Jirí Barta / Schola Gregoriana Pragensis DIALOGUES

The renowned ensemble Schola Gregoriana Pragensis and the leading Czech cellist Jiri Barta have been pursuing dialogues on concert stages for a number of years. They share abundant experience of music both early and contemporary, improvisation and seeking. The fruit of their encounters is a recording that is a multilayered dialogue between the sonorous sound of the cello and the male voice, a dialogue between the chorale and medieval polyphony and the creation of the past few decades, music written and improvised. The idea of "mirroring the past in the present" is the overarching theme connecting pieces by contemporary composers. Peter Graham's Suite for Cello Solo reveals his having been inspired by Bach solo suites. The contemporary musical phraseology and the Gregorian tradition are originally interconnected in the meditative composition Miserere by the Polish creator Paweˆ Szymanski, while the structure of Arvo Part's famous piece Fratres is a sort of reminiscence of medieval polyphony.
The music, in places verging on silence, affords the listener scope for inner soothing and perception of fine nuances that often remain concealed to us in the turbulent world around. (Supraphon 2010)