Ketevan Sacred Music Festival

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Ketevan World Sacred Music Festival

The website of Ketevan World Sacred Music Festival is alive and kicking again. The overall pitch of the festival, scheduled to be held from 10^th to 19^th February, is a confluence of musical strains from different era and  presents a dialogue across varied musical traditions from the East and the West. The opening concert ‘Mediterranean Dialogues’ will set the tone for the festival. The Arabic oud (a pear-shaped stringed instrument) will be played in tandem with Flamenco guitar, exploring the connection between traditional Arabic and Andalusian music along the Mediterranean.

The brainchild of Executive Director Rudolf Ludwig and the Artistic Director Santiago Lusardi Girelli, this festival debuted last year at the historic venue of UNESCO World Heritage site of St. Augustine ruins and St. Monica, Old Goa. Flutists, violinists, pianists, cellists, sitarists, fadistas, and choral ensembles of over a hundred musicians and researchers collaborated to render the universal song of love and joy.

A nascent ensemble, Goa University Choir, the first university choir in India comprising of students from Goa University and members of the Goan community has been evolving under the tutelage of maestro Santiago Lusardi Girelli. The concept of a university choir is not just a performance playfield but a fecund ground for exploration, innovation and realization of avant garde ideas. Santiago is creating symphonies between acoustically varied forms of music. He says that it is in the intersection of musical diversities that new meanings are sought and found. Sediment of different tongues lines the singing vocabulary of these concerts.. The high point for the choir will be the concert “History of Tenderness”.  

The Cantata ‘The Etche Berri’, inspired by the life of St Francis Xavier, is an original composition specially composed for the Ketevan Festival. It will be performed by a baroque and Indian Carnatic ensemble along with the GU choir. Composer, musicologist, pedagogue and choral/orchestra director Vasco Negreiros (Portugal) is the composer. Another concert, Vasco Negreiro’s piano cycle ‘Quattuor Elementa - Four Elements’ (Songs of Kindness & the Four Elements) and its depiction of the four classical elements of fire, air, water and earth will be a guideline for 21^st century Portuguese music. Besides this, vocal ensembles from Spain( Vandalia Vocal Ensemble) and Hungary (St Ephrain Male Choir)will weave their own magic into the shows. 

A candlelight concert at St Monica, ‘Hildegard to Cage’, celebrating the mystical compositions of  11th century Benedictine nun named Hildegard Von Bingen (mystic, writer, musician, philosopher and naturalist), is another peak  of the festival. The spiritual compositions of the visionary abbess and healer from the picturesque Rhine Valley, Germany are amongst the most astonishing and unique creations from the dynamic milieu of 12th century Benedictine monasticism. St. Hildegard suffered weak health, but tapped into her altered mental state and wrote beautiful words, composed songs and set them to music. In consummate dialogue with Popes and religious men, she is also considered a feminist and once wrote, “Woman may be made from man, but no man can be made without a woman.”

Juxtaposed at the other end of the spectrum is the mystical legacy of John Cage   - something that needs deconstruction as well as celebration. The (in)famous silent piece  4'33'' a masterstroke of sonic emptiness, radically altered the meaning of music as it had been understood before, and this would  be an experiential journey at the festival. Cage’s openness, egolessness, freedom and I Ching aleatory (chance) mechanism of composing the ‘Water Walk’  or ‘Etudes Australes’ will heighten  listeners’ expectations.

An interlude with certain ancient medieval musical instruments also lies in store. Viola Da Gamba, played by the exponent Sofia Diniz (Germany), is expected to be a soft dreamy drone in the intimate confines of the St Monica Church. An encounter with the Irish world through its traditional harp (the instrument of the God Dagda) and the traverso (wooden flute), the typical Irish shepherd’s best companion, will take us into the mist of the Celtic mythical creativity.

Celebrated pianist Marialena Fernandes (Austria) and the Ketevan Chamber Orchestra (Spain,

Argentina, Germany, UK and France) will explore the sacred in nature through a series of suites of the great Brazilian composer Heitor Villa Lobos ́s ‘Bachianas Brasileiras’: an idiosyncratic meeting ground of Baroque techniques(evoking the world of Bach’s Baroque instrumental suites) and ideas with the Brazilian folk and popular musical sources . Villa Lobo’s oft-repeated phrase “My music is natural, like a waterfall,” will echo in the listener’s ears before the opening of this concert. 

Virtuoso pianists like Marialena Fernandes and Karl Luchtmayer (both of Indian origin, now based in Vienna and England respectively) will delight the audiences with their line-up of compositions in separate concerts at St Monica Church. ‘Sacrality of Fado’, as the programme sheet reads, exposes the roots, the blood that runs deep through tearful, nostalgic and torn veins of Fado. North African, Sephardic, Iberian, Indian (Sonia Shirsat) and Arabic musicians will explore the origins of Fado and the broken love story between God and Portugal.

I hope that you will immerse yourself in a musical experience that promises to be not only socially enriching but also an education on the diversity of world music.