Date/Time
Date(s) - 27 Apr 2014
3:00 PM - 4:30 PM
Location
Fort Tryon Park
Category(ies) No Categories
Concerts at The Cloisters presents…
Sequentia
Frankish Phantoms, Echoes from the Carolingian Palaces
Sunday, April 27, at 1 p.m. and 3 p.m.
The New York premiere of this new program, conceived by Benjamin Bagby, explores the musical world of the Carolingian court. Collaborating with musicologist Sam Barrett, Bagby has reconstructed lost melodies from this golden age of European song when scholars and poets from England, Spain, Francia, and Germanic lands flourished under the enigmatic and powerful Frankish rulers. The program includes reconstructions of La Cantilène de sainte Eulalie (the oldest surviving song text in French), Hildebrandslied (the Old High German battle-song), the Latin lament for the death of Charlemagne (d. 814), and other songs and canticles, often with instrumental accompaniment or as instrumental music.
Tickets: $40. A discounted ticket price of $20 is available to students with current ID only for tickets bought at The Cloisters on the day of the concert.
For advance tickets, please visit our website at www.metmuseum.org, or call the box office at (212) 570-3949.
One of the preeminent practitioners of early music, Benjamin Bagby received a double degree in voice and German from Oberlin College and a diploma on medieval music from the Schola Cantorum in Basel, Switzerland. With the late Barbara Thornton he co-founded the ensemble Sequentia in Cologne in 1974. The group is now based in Paris, where Bagby teaches medieval music performance practice at the Sorbonne. Under his direction, Sequentia’s recordings have received such awards as the Insbrucker Radiopreis, the Deutscher Schallplattenpreis, the Edison Award (the Netherlands), the Disque d’Or, and Diapason d’Or.
Since 1990 Bagby has performed a number of reconstructed medieval oral epics in Old Icelandic, Old High German, and Anglo-Saxon, including Edda and The Rheingold Curse. A more recent CD, “Lost Songs of a Rheinland Harper,” explores Latin and German song around the year 1000 and was performed at The Cloisters in 2004. Bagby has been described as “an uninhibited interpreter and actor” (Boston Globe), his performance “so vivid, so explicit in its dramatic gesture and power of representation” (The Jerusalem Post), it creates “a thrilling event of an almost shamanistic power” (NRC Handelsblad, Rotterdam).