As an aural and visual experience it was one of the most moving events of this year's Festival.

Ms. Livljanic has assembled a work so magnificent and moving that its resemblance to what medieval listeners might have heard is beside the point.

Boundaries were blurred in the International Festival with the listing of the six women singers of Dialogos in the theatre section of the programme as acknowledgement of the thoughtful staging and lighting of their music in Canongate Kirk. Tondal's Vision was a reconstruction of a 12th century visionary Christian text set to beautifully sung medieval polyphony.

As an aural and visual experience it was one of the most moving events of this year's Festival.

One has the feeling that 'Tondal's Vision' and Dalmatia represent primarily a source of inspiration for 'a musical vision' of Katarina Livljanic. There is no doubt that her work is based on a deep knowledge of the sources, of the historical context and performance practices of traditional singers on the Dalmatian coast. But it is mostly her musical and dramatic intuition which give to this very specialized program a much larger force and dimension. In a reinvented musical language, between plain-chant, readings, traditional melodies and simple polyphonies (full of unexpected intervals), seven singers with superb voices and a rare commitment, carry us on a visionary voyage through time and space… to the other-side. Remarquable! (Diapason d'or of the year)

An inclassifiable object that miraculously gives birth to a masterpiece.

There are some recordings which captivate the listener immediately. This is one of them ; and it's very surprising as well : by its theme, its music, and by the commitment of the singers led by Katarina Livljanic. The singing is luminous. Truly. This is music which makes your soul and your body vibrate, and in front of which one remains speechless. This record is an absolute discovery.

This is one of the most captivating recordings of early music that exist. An unbelievable journey. [...] Thanks to musicologist, singer and director Katarina Livljanić, the archaic becomes present, and the Middle Ages speak to us. This is more than a reconstruction!

It is passionate and divinely beautiful from the beginning to the end.

When sound gives birth to a vision..... One receives, in listening to the wonderful recording by Dialogos, a vision that leads to a universe, crossed by lightning from the hereafter that briefly illuminates a sorrowful soul.

The legendary voices of the Ensemble Dialogos have marvellously interpreted "Tondal's Vision": voluminous and expressive voices, and a perfect diction of ancient Croatian.

Yet again, Katarina Livljanic has created a real miracle… This miracle grows from her strong and passionate conviction that 'old music' never became 'old', just that we have forgotten it. KL shows her love for the past by using it as a living, strong and vital materia. She uses it to create artistic and musical forms which become alive in her excellent interpretation.

Her art and manner of working triumph in concerts like this one, in which the audience is charmed during 90 minutes, breathless, with no interruption, by 6 magnificent voices shaped in the most excellent manner, precise as a blade.

In an appropriate and well-conceived staging by Sanda Hržić, who employed only lighting, motion and discrete gestures of the singers, this brilliant ensemble performed 'Tondal's Vision'.

KL created a musical fabric woven by delicate threads of Glagolitic, Gregorian and Beneventan chant, conserved in musical sources of medieval Dalmatia and in traditional chant. As in the most fantastic scientists' dreams of reviving lost species by using DNA fossils, KL is using written and oral traces to create her art and move the spirit of today's audience, with no difficulty, just as it would have pushed a medieval monk into a visionary and spiritual ecstasy. The most important criterium for musical authenticity is the conviction and force to move the audience. This criterium makes KL into an equally brilliant medievalist and artist.

At a late hour, in the church of St Pantaleon, the group of women's figures dressed in black, singing with the voices of angels, led the audience deeper in a truly labirinth of death. The medieval ' Vision of Tondal ', a knight, was masterfully reconstructed for six voices, based on glagolitic and latin sources. The liveliness of these ancient litany-forms, sometimes with astonishing dissonances, was transmitted during 75 minutes with a heartbreaking force.

One of the high points (of the festival Romanischer Sommer) was reached at midnight in the church of St Pantaleon, in the high, slender spaces of the former Benedictine abbey, where the Parisian ensemble Dialogos painted with sound-pictures the medieval 'Tondal's Vision', a grandiose witness to medieval piety. The conception and direction of this project were in the hands of the young, extremely impressive musicologist, singer and director Katarina Livljanic. Using old musical sources from Dalmatia and southern Italy, she reconstructed this long voyage of the soul into an invisible world; austerity and expressivity, humility and pathos were so thoroughly merged that the listener sensed the depth of the journey.

A well-adapted staging and lighting by Sanda Hržić are entirely in the service of this moving story and the music which accompanies it, performed by six excellent singers in stylized black costumes. They sang this piece with an unbelievable force and dramatic intensity in their voices.

Dialogos, directed by KL, is searching for inspiration in very ancient sources and using archaic elements to take us on a trip to a world which is very distant and yet close to us. Knocking on the door of a hidden historical memory, this ensemble inspires attentive and pure listening in silence and concentration.