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Posted 10-19-00
CLEVELAND -- The next event in Case Western Reserve University's early music concert series -- Chapel, Court, & Countryside -- will feature Benjamin Bagby and his ensemble, Sequentia, in a concert of medieval music from Germany and Iceland. The concert begins at 8 p.m. Saturday, October 21 in Harkness Chapel.
Sequentia's concert is titled, "The Year One K: Lost Songs of a Rhineland Harper." Around the year 1000, Anglo-Saxon monks in Canterbury copied a collection of Latin and German songs, originally from the Rhineland, into a magnificent manuscript. The songs may have been composed by one musician or several. They delighted the powerful bishops, secular nobility, and young intelligentsia of the cosmopolitan towns along the Rhine.
During the same era, Icelandic skalds held listeners spellbound with poetic stories from the Edda, Iceland's national epic. Sequentia's concert will include one of these, "The Lay of Attila the Hun," the earliest-known version of the famous Rhinegold tale of greed, betrayal and murder. This story has survived in writing only in Iceland and was probably among the first European songs heard in North America, where Norsemen built the first white settlements.
Sequentia was founded in 1977 by Benjamin Bagby, whose performances of Beowulf enthralled Harkness Chapel audiences last month, and is based in Cologne, Germany. The ensemble is a flexible group, whose musical forces vary to suit music of different regions. For this concert, the performers will be Bagby, singers Lena Suzanne Norin and Eric Mentzel, and harpist/flute player Norbert Rodenkirchen.
Tickets are $20, $18 for students and those over age 65, or $10 each for groups of 10 or more. For tickets, contact CWRU's Department of Music at 216-368-2402, ext. 1, or in 201 Haydn Hall.