For the concert week running Thursday 1 October through Sunday 4 October, the essential trip is Holland Baroque’s Dialogos with Ensemble Constantinople at Concertgebouw on Saturday 3 October. This is a compact, sharply defined afternoon programme: the 14:15 performance takes place in the Recital Hall and brings Holland Baroque alongside Kiya Tabassian on setar and voice, Didem Başar on qanûn, and percussionist Patrick Graham. In a calendar full of late-night electronic bills and touring rock shows, this is the event built around sustained attention: a meeting of players whose instruments, musical lineages and approaches to old material have been placed in active conversation.[1][2][3]

Dialogos takes its title and premise from the 1219 meeting between Francis of Assisi and Sultan al-Malik al-Kamil during the Fifth Crusade. Holland Baroque and Constantinople frame that encounter as a starting point for dialogue across cultures and centuries. The historical episode carries layers of interpretation: scholars point out that later devotional accounts require care, while confirming a meeting set against the violence of the crusade. That nuance gives the concert a useful seriousness. Its subject is exchange, with history treated as an invitation to listen closely and a frame with meaning beyond decoration.[2][3][4]

A programme with old manuscripts and living composers

The musical route is concrete. Holland Baroque identifies the Canticle of the Sun from 1225, material from the Laudario di Cortona manuscript, works connected to Ali Ufki, and pieces by Tabassian, Başar, Judith Steenbrink and Tineke Steenbrink among the programme’s ingredients. Concertgebouw’s listing names Başar’s Echoes of the Throne Room, Steenbrink’s Frate Vento, Heaven lives in the other, written with material by Cantemir, and Welcome. These titles suggest an afternoon shaped through sequence and texture, letting medieval sources, Baroque-era currents and present-tense composition share the same frame.[1][2]

The personnel make that frame legible in the room. Tabassian’s setar and Başar’s qanûn bring plucked-string colours central to Constantinople’s side of the collaboration; Graham supplies percussion; Holland Baroque carries the ensemble body and the arrangements under Judith and Tineke Steenbrink’s musical direction. The project’s official descriptions foreground improvisation, composition, old repertoire and contemporary writing together, making the act of connection part of the material itself.[1][2][3]

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Why the Saturday afternoon slot suits it

Concertgebouw is an apt scale for this particular encounter. Its Recital Hall setting and 85-minute, continuous format give the programme a defined arc, starting at 14:15 and ending at 15:40. That timing also makes Dialogos a rare daytime anchor in Amsterdam’s Saturday schedule: early enough for listeners arriving from elsewhere in the country, yet substantial enough to justify planning the day around it. The strongest reason to go is the specificity of the pairing. Holland Baroque and Constantinople have designed a shared vocabulary, then entrusted it to musicians who inhabit its distinct sounds.[1][2][3]

Plan the visit

Dialogos is at Concertgebouw, Amsterdam, on Saturday 3 October at 14:15. Arrive with time to settle into the Recital Hall and let the programme’s links emerge at concert pace. Recheck the official Concertgebouw and Holland Baroque pages before travelling for tickets, access information and any schedule changes.[1][2]

Sources

  1. Dialogos: Holland Baroque & Ensemble Constantinople — Concertgebouw
  2. Dialogos — Holland Baroque
  3. Dialogos — Constantinople
  4. Encountering the ‘Other’ with ‘The Sultan and the Saint’ — The Catholic University of America