Composer Between Worlds: Dimitrie Cantemir

Thursday, June 11, 2009, 7:30 pm

Freer Gallery, Meyer Auditorium

Free tickets required

The Turkish trio Neva Özgen (kemenche), Murat Aydemir (tanbur), and Mesut Özgen (guitar) are joined by Lux Musica on baroque harpsichord, flute, violin, and viol.

Travel to eighteenth-century Istanbul and Moscow through the music of composer, scholar, and diplomat Dimitrie Cantemir, a flamboyant and brilliant figure who served both the Ottoman sultan and the Russian tsar. A speaker of eleven languages, he wrote a history of the Ottomans that inspired Edward Gibbon with The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. His treatise on Turkish classical music included more than 350 original compositions. After he led an ill-fated rebellion against the Ottomans in Moldavia, Cantemir escaped to Moscow, where he helped translate the Byzantine Greek liturgy into Russian. Turkish instrumentalists join the Baroque music ensemble Lux Musica to recreate the sounds of Cantemir's Moldavian homeland and his careers in Istanbul and Moscow, where he organized lavish musical events with his daughter, a harpsichordist trained in the Italian style. Presented in conjunction with The Tsars and the East.

Source

Photo credit: The ruins of the house of Dimitrie Cantemir in Fener, İstanbul, Turkey, where Cantemir lived between 1687-1710

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