Constantinople

A 17th-century manuscript that was compiled by Albert Bobowski, a Polish musician and orientalist, contains songs of the Italian Renaissance and the Ottoman court. Bobowski, alias Ali Ufki, was born around 1610 in Poland and worked in Constantinople at the Ottoman court, where he related to many European diplomats, clerics and travellers as translator, language teacher, mediator and advisor. Thanks to his diverse skills and profound knowledge of the Islamic-Ottoman and Christian-European cultures, he became a valued mediator between the two worlds during his lifetime. In this collection of European and Ottoman vocal and instrumental, sacred and secular, court and popular music, Ali Ufki switches between languages and music genres with a fantastic ease and naturalness.

"…[Turkish-American composer] Kamran Ince (b. 1960) mixes such diverse elements as medieval compositional techniques, Middle Eastern folk music, Bach chorales, wild percussion, tone clusters, and the styles of late Romanticism as well as modern Russia. He also drops nontraditional instruments, such as electric guitar, electric bass, and synthesizer, into the normal symphony orchestra. Yet this very pictoral and striking music could not be called avant-garde; it communicates instantly and clearly in a language quite its own. Ince not only attempts to depict the sound of pounding waves in one section of his lovely piano concerto 'Remembering Lycia', but also wittily portrays 'speeches' by the emperor of Constantinople and the Turkish conqueror in his five-movement symphony about the 15th-century 'Fall of Constantinople'."

La chute de Constantinople 1453 de Abraham Kingsley donne vie à l'un des moments les plus marquants de l'histoire avec une narration vivante qui vous transportera dans les derniers jours de l'Empire byzantin. La chute de cette ville légendaire était plus qu'une simple défaite militaire : c'était la fin d'une époque, une collision entre deux grands mondes et l'aube d'un nouveau pouvoir. …