Constituting the very last stage of a Canadian tour, the Montreal concert of the Dialogos project, merging the ensembles Constantinople and Holland Baroque, was held at the Bourgie Hall last Saturday, March 21, 2026.
What a beautiful and touching musical and artistic experience! Dialogos is the most recent album by Constantinople, created in collaboration with the Holland Baroque ensemble, and released under the Pentatone label. I will not revisit the ins and outs of this meeting based on the very real dialogue that took place between Saint Francis of Assisi and Sultan Al Malik in 1219. I mention all of this in my review of the album.
I will therefore focus on the concert itself. The music, all composed by members of both ensembles (except for one), unites different aesthetics in a very successful ecumenism. The microtonal sounds (significantly softened, though) of the traditional instruments from Constantinople (Kiya Tabassian’s setar and Didem Basar’s kanûn) intertwine very naturally with the classical polyphonic lines of Holland Baroque. The finely chiselled and unified rhythms in impressive coherence, the sparkling colours of both the classical strings and the percussion (delicate but essential Patrick Graham) and the setar and kanûn, as well as the voices of Tabasian (wonderful traditional Persian singing) and Adrián Rodríguez Van der Spoel (mediaeval singing), all contributed to transporting us to another realm where beauty and goodness are not pejorative, and are especially not perceived as a weakness.
I remember another equally inspiring fusion from Constantinople a few years ago: the marriage between the poetry of Omar Khayyam and the music of Bach. We were in the same inspiring waters last Saturday.
Bravo to everyone who participated in this stimulating and hopeful meeting.
