Vancouver Playhouse
Benjamin Bagby & Sequentia: Gregorius
Artists: Sequentia – Benjamin Bagby, voice and harp; Jasmina Črnčič, voice and harp, and Lukas Papenfusscline, voice
Benjamin Bagby, known for his performance of Beowulf, returns to Vancouver with the astonishing medieval verse epic Gregorius, “The Holy Sinner”. A narrative poem of sin and redemption, Gregorius retells the legend of St. Gregory the Great.
Bagby is joined by his medieval music ensemble Sequentia, known for their innovative, intimate, and enchanting performances of ancient texts ranging from Hildegard von Bingen to the Icelandic Edda. Sequentia’s virtuosic performances are compelling, surprising in their immediacy, and strike the listener with a timeless emotional connection to our own past musical cultures.
Generously sponsored by Elaine Adair.
Benjamin Bagby, voice and harp
Vocalist, harper and medievalist Benjamin Bagby has been an important figure in the field of medieval musical performance for over 40 years. Since 1977, when he and the late Barbara Thornton co-founded Sequentia, his time has been almost entirely devoted to the research, performance and recording work of the ensemble.
Apart from this, Mr. Bagby is deeply involved with the solo performance of Anglo-Saxon and Germanic oral poetry: his acclaimed performance of Beowulf has been heard worldwide and was released as a DVD in 2007. In 2017, he was awarded the Artist of the Year Award by REMA, the European Early Music Network. In addition to researching and creating over 75 programs for Sequentia, Mr. Bagby has published widely, writing about medieval performance practice; as a guest lecturer and professor, he has taught courses and workshops all over Europe and North America. Between 2005 and 2018 he taught medieval music performance practice at the Sorbonne – University of Paris. He currently teaches medieval music performance at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen, Germany.
Jasmina Črnčič, voice and harp
Jasmina Črnčič is a singer from Maribor, Slovenia. Drawing on her rich experience in choral and theatre work as well as a classical formal education, she now specializes in the performance of music from the Middle Ages. She is a member of the critically acclaimed ensembles for medieval music Sequentia and Per-Sonat and devotes much of her time to developing new pedagogical approaches which are especially suited for the study of the music of the early/high Middle Ages. Jasmina is currently a faculty member of the International Course on Medieval Music Performance of Besalú.
As a member of the Slovenian ensemble Carmina Slovenica, she has performed in numerous staged and concert productions both as a part of the vocal ensemble as well as a soloist at many festivals and concert venues around the world (New York’s Prototype Festival, Melbourne Festival, Operadagen Rotterdam, Radialsystem V Berlin, Holland Festival, Ruhrtriennale, and others). She currently divides her time between Cologne and Paris.
Lukas Papenfusscline, voice
Lukas Papenfusscline is a singer and performance-maker based in Brooklyn, NY. Both a medieval and new music specialist, their practice fuses these disparate worlds exclusively through collaboration. A sought-after vocalist for concert, opera, and theatre, Lukas is a member of Sequentia, the world-renowned medieval ensemble, as well as Fourth Wall, a new vocal ensemble based in NYC, and can regularly be seen with iconic artists such as Four Larks, Eve Beglarian, and Ran Blake. Their extensive performance experience has brought them all around the world, to legendary venues like the Getty Villa Museum, La MaMa, Hong Kong's Queen Elizabeth Stadium, the Théâtre du Chatelet, and the Hirschhorn Museum.
