Previous editions:
2025
This year's edition of our early music festival takes us back through a past interwoven with pilgrim paths paved by hope and faith. The ensemble Doulce Memoire brings us pilgrims songs in the form of laude - Italian-language devotional songs Sungs by confraternities and pilgrims, allowing us, for the first time in Kotor, to encounter with the music of Fra Serafino Razzi, a Dominican who, after his stay in our city, wrote The Life of Blessed Osanna of Kotor, the first printed biography of the local beata. The ensemble La Margarite presents music by the Doge's piffaro player, Zorzi Trombetta, the first professional trumpeter in the service of the Most Serene Republic. who recorded two performances in Kotor: one at a wedding, and another for which he received a reward from the bishop himself - a testament to the city's high musical culture. The ensemble Peregrina takes us to the beginnings of the Polish Kingdon (1025) with music composed for the coronation ritual, while Labyrinthus reveals the healing power of music as understood by ancient and medieval theorists. Paul Kieffer will present the works of the blind lutenist and great traveller Giacomo Gorzanis, and in the second concert, ensemble Labyrinthus will perform sequences from the liturgical manuscripts of Sibenik, transporting us into the medieval Dalmatian cultural context.
don Robert Tonsati
2024
In 1166, Bishop Malon of Kotor consecrated the Cathedral of Saint Tryphon—a new temple dedicated to the patron saint of Kotor and a new episcopal see for himself and his successors. It was destined to become the cornerstone of Kotor's spirituality, culture, artistic creativity, and identity. The Cathedral has, quite rightly, become the most extensively studied cultural monument in Montenegro. Yet, while many aspects of its existence are well known today, its inner life through the passing centuries remains largely veiled in mystery.
I believe that the inaugural edition of the Festival has succeeded in bringing a small, yet exceptionally important part of the inner life of this Cathedral and the city closer to today's audiences. I refer to its music, which from the moment of consecration to the present day has held a central place—one it rightfully occupies within Church tradition, which through song and music expresses its prayer in the most sublime manner.
The programmes offered by the Festival are based on the Cathedral's oldest manuscripts as well as other sources with which Kotor has been connected throughout its long history, and which have shaped its civilisational fabric. I hope they have offered us an insight into a complex spiritual and cultural microcosm where cultures and their bearers intertwine, accepting and transforming inspirations, and breaking down the countless barriers that today's—often distorted and superficial—perception of the past might seek to impose.
don Robert Tonsati
