In its various aspects, music allows us to make journeys of real dimensions into places, sounds, and languages, different landscapes.

This is what Irmos Ensemble offers, an all-female group dedicated to the repertoire of the ancient Christian tradition developed in the lands of the East: a true journey.

An indispensable exploration of linguistic specificities, that is, being, even before being musicians, native speakers, and thus inherently able to intone songs created in liturgical contexts, particularly Byzantine, Greek, Orthodox, but also Georgian and Serbian.

A song sometimes in a monophonic form, other times polyphonic, but always without the support of musical instruments, an aspect that makes it particularly touching and certainly unique compared to the Western tradition, which, starting shortly after the year 1000, increasingly integrates vocal practice with instrumental.

The favored realm of Eastern Christian singing is the Orthodox monasteries, which arose in great numbers during the medieval period in Greece, Ukraine, Russia.

In these contexts, the sung chant is a fundamental and central aspect of the liturgical celebration, along with the passages chosen from the Scriptures, chanted by the celebrant.

It is not so much the commentary on these passages that determines their character as the auditory contemplation that arises from listening to single-voice melodic lines, on the drone, in polyphonic intertwining that, almost halting time, allow one to pause in front of the iconostasis, permeating oneself with the light that emanates from it.

Light and sound, eye and ear in harmonious alliance: this is what this ancient tradition offers today to those who feel the desire for intimate real connection between themselves and the divine.

Free entry, conscious offering.

Listening-meditation within The Way to the Sanctuary. Musical, poetic, and knowledge itinerary Irmos Ensemble, direction Margarita Swarczewskaja  Repertoire of ancient Eastern Christian tradition