THE UNIQUE MUSICAL PILGRIMAGE OF KRYŠTOF HARANT TO JERUSALEM WITH CAPPELLA MARIANA AND ENSEMBLE CONSTANTINOPLE

NOWADAYS, we feel it is more important than ever to build and recreate bridges between civilisations, cultures and peoples. Bridges that encourage us to come together and to reconcile, bridges that call for dialogue and conversation, for a synergy of ideas and actions that help us to live a more peaceful present and to prepare a better future together. This is not just an ideal or a utopian vision of humanity, but a real and urgent need for the healing of our society.

Accordingly, the present album is sung in seven languages. Harant’s liturgical works were intended to be performed in churches; hence on the recording they are acoustically different from the instrumentally more colourful Middle Eastern music. The album’s final piece, Otce Buoha nebeského (Our Father, God in Heaven), concludes our pilgrimage in an intimate conjunction, combining a Czech sacred song from the milieu of literary brotherhoods, so typical of Bohemian Renaissance music, with a prayer to a text by the Persian poet Hafez.