The Byzantine festival is a serious affair, spanning six weeks of music and talks. Let's hope the academic side is better conceived than this concert, mainly of music inspired by Byzantium that proved a pale imitation of the real thing.
The advertised title was Patricia Rozario Sings Hildegard. But that wasn't what the evening delivered, and once they'd stopped wondering why a 12th-century Rhineland nun was headlining a festival exploring Byzantium, devoted fans of Hildegard of Bingen will have felt short-changed at hearing only one brief song of hers, and that not performed very alluringly.
Still, technically speaking, Rozario was singing Hildegard for a large part of Christos Hatzis's De Angelis. This was the most - tempting to say the only - ambitious work on the programme. Hildegard's O Gloriosissimi formed the basis, sung at length by Rozario, reflected in disembodied state by three soloists and developed by the choir. When Hatzis got too far from Hildegard his harmonies turned soupy, and the piece is too long, but there's the germ of something decent in there.
Otherwise, the best of a turgid bunch was, not surprisingly, the piece least hidebound by the pseudo-chant straitjacket; this was John Vergin's When Augustus Reigned, and as a member of Capella Romana, the smaller of the two choirs on the bill, its composer was there to sing it. But the premiere of Ivan Moody's plodding Passion of St Catherine made the saint's story sound uninspiring, and in this unatmospheric acoustic John Tavener's Let Not the Prince Be Silent was far from uplifting.
But then, why should choirs want to sing this stuff anyway? With all those sustained drones it's as tedious to rehearse as it is to perform. Capella Romana, all the way from Seattle and Portland with their conductor Alexander Lingas, were getting paid, so little sympathy there, and their performance could have been more finely polished. The larger, amateur English Chamber Choir did themselves credit; but how much better it would be to hear them in some decent music.
