The Winchester Troper, a jukebox +++ well ahead of its time, survives in two manuscripts: a veritable Ark of the Covenant of polyphony, notated around the year 1000. With each new recording, Dialogos and its founder, Katarina Livljanić, fashion ingenuous, often crime-thriller-like dramas from the material. Here, two voices and two instruments recreate an attempted poisoning in the style of a game of Cluedo. On 19 February 964, Bishop Æthelwold expelled the canons of Winchester and replaced them with monks from Abingdon. The chronicler Wulfstan described the canons as depraved, insolent, gluttonous, drunken and highly promiscuous; they had even allegedly attempted to poison the bishop. Drawing on neumes whose interpretation remains hypothetical, the performers bring this little theatre of depravity back to life. God gave music to humankind to cleanse it of its impurities. And the result is absolutely stunning!

The programme is conceived as a musical radio play. Katarina Livljanić has reconstructed the music of texts from Wulfstan's Vita Sancti Aetheluuoldi and interwoven them with pieces from the Winchester Troper, that precious source which, at the dawn of the first millennium, left us one of the earliest collections of notated polyphony. Two female voices, fiddle and flutes create sound worlds that are both haunting and magical. The listening perspective shifts throughout: at times, a voice seems right beside the ear; at others, it recedes into the surrounding space. Spoken prose, monophonic chant, early organa and improvisatory interludes intertwine.

At the very beginning, an unseen voice calls out to the bishop: "Aetheluuolde, Aetheluuolde!" The canons' excesses are denounced (Blasphematores Dei), the monks arrive (Servite Domino), and the conflict escalates. A liturgical excommunication thunders against the "blasphemers". Then comes the dramatic heart of the story: the bishop drinks the poison. In the extended Tractus Deus, deus meus, recorded here in its organum setting for the first time since the tenth century, the music reaches its climax — virtuosic, sophisticated and astonishingly modern in its freshness. Two voices intertwine in some of the earliest known polyphonic masterpieces of the Western world. Instrumental improvisations respond like glosses, while sequence melodies with the curious names Berta vetula and Bucca excelsa open up experimental sound worlds. In the end, Æthelwold triumphs, and the jubilant prose Laude celebret brings the drama full circle.

Katarina Livljanić and Clara Coutouly sing with great expressive power and a vivid sense of the text, at times a cappella, at others in dialogue with the instruments. Albrecht Maurer (fiddle and rebec) and Norbert Rodenkirchen (flutes) move effortlessly between ritual and imagination. The nearly seventy minutes fly by. Anyone who fears that early polyphony might sound monotonous will be proved wrong: both ear and soul are opened to new horizons. We are immersed in a world that is foreign and yet strangely familiar, where power, silence and song converge.

This is not a CD like any other. It is a journey through time, a drama in sound and, at the same time, an affectionate encounter with music that has lain in the shadows for almost a thousand years. Ensemble Dialogos does not bring it back as a museum piece, but as a living, breathless presence. We return to the world changed — deeply moved and fascinated. Highly recommended listening.

Old is no longer what it was

(…) Ensemble Dialogos did not forget that all music - including the very oldest - is mostly the art of storytelling. (…) We went to a concert of early medieval music and came home with stories about perversions, violent acts, murders and miracles. Say again that classical concerts are boring ! (…)

It advocates for Katarina Livljanic's professionalism - she has used these fabulous facts so smoothly and surely. From a resourceful playlist of medieval polyphony, she made a convincing narrative that took the form of a miracle story. (…) What could have potentially been dull two-part polyphonies, thus assumed the expressiveness of early Baroque opera. As in a duet full of excommunications, in which both voices struck and whipped up each other . Or in the prayer that started as a desperate cry of wandering voices in search of a resting point. Or the angelic healing of the poisoned Aethelwold, exposed in a cloud of fragmented melodies. Another highlight was the genealogy of Jesus' family tree. In circling formulas it suddenly seemed like you were listening to the vocal minimal music of Meredith Monk. We rarely heard a concert that jumped so easily over a thousand years of music history