The city of Constantinople was a spiritual crossroads of the ancient world. To the West, there was Christianity and Europe; to the East, Muslims were reaching a cultural peak that would soon be shattered by the Crusades. It only makes sense that such a culturally diverse city inspires an equally diverse multimedia piece that combines modern classical chamber music with vocals, dance and the latest in projection technology. The Gryphon Trio is bringing composer Christos Hatzis’s Constantinople to The Grand for this year’s High Performance Rodeo after a successful workshop at The Banff Centre with John Murrell and a critically acclaimed run in Toronto.
Founded in 1993 by cellist Roman Borys, pianist Jamie Parker and violinist Annalee Patipatanakoon, The Gryphon Trio is a chamber group that embraces everything from Haydn to the hands-on experience of working with living composers. However, it was clear from the start that this was one of the most ambitious projects the group had ever attempted.
“We met Cristos Hatzis in 1998,” says Borys. “We just really hit it off. We discovered we had all sorts of common interests, but we particularly enjoyed talking about the possibility of creating a new piece that would also leave room for a visual component. I was discovering the work of stage director Robert le Page at that time. He was already at a level that was sort of unapproachable for us. I made a note of the various contributing artists he was working with, and I just sort of reached out — called them and found that they were very interested in working with other people as well.”
Constantinople is a feast for the eyes and the ears, with ancient city walls, stained glass and wonderfully detailed abstract images projected on both costume and scrim alike. The dancing features delicately choreographed movement balanced with powerful haunting vocals. With design heavyweights like Lionel Arnould and Jacques Collin contributing to the piece as well as directing, and choreography by Marie-Joisee Chartier, it would be easy to get lost in the visual world of Constantinople, but Borys is quick to point out that it’s more than just what you see that sets Constantinople apart. The piece, which premiered in 2000 as part of the Music Toronto series, contains eight movements, with such titles as “Odd World,” “Dance of the Dictators” and “On Death and Dying.” The very format of the show itself is something unique in the world of chamber music. “Here we were, typically presenting a program of an hour-and-a-half of Brahms and Haydn and usually some contemporary work, and we’re presenting an 85-minute contemporary work with no intermission. You know it’s a risk. But we sold the thing out, because we played a couple of movements on the radio and people just really responded.”
There was some significant interest from the theatre community after that première, but Borys has particular praise for renowned Canadian playwright John Murrell and how he brought the many components together during the run at The Banff Centre. “John was the key to us finding our way to a common ground between Hatzis’s music and all these other artists,” he says. “In a sense, we sort of lived the whole idea of Constantinople, in that we were bringing together these people from very diverse backgrounds, both cultural and spiritual. Murrell created a sort of poetic translation of the music. He is working on his third opera, so the idea of combining words and music is something that he’s quite familiar with and uniquely positions him to do miracles.”
The integration of multimedia into contemporary classical music is certainly unique, but Borys believes that Constantinople provides an example that will catch on. “I can’t necessarily take credit for it, but I definitely see opera companies embracing the kind of projection technology that we used. So, for opera companies this is creating an opportunity to replace cumbersome hard sets. It’s something that LePage was spearheading internationally and definitely showed the classical music world how it can be done.”
