LOST SONGS of a Rhineland Harper, X-XI centuries
A concert of Sequentia and Benjamin Bagby in the November 2, 2004 at the Angel Orensanz Center.
The documentary film of the concert by Klara Palotai aired in the program in mid-November 2004.


The concert of Benjamin Bagby's Beowulf was aired last summer .
Documentary recording/editing by Zoi Florosz

B. Bagby (picture taken at the Orensanz Center) dressed in simple, unassuming black, on a stage illuminated by candles, takes the role of chieftain's bard, recreating the chilling and bloodthirsty tale of Beowulf.

In the revered medieval tradition of itinerant weaver of stories, Bagby accompanies his expressive tenor voice with a six string lyre. He improvises melodies using a brilliant array of dramatic rhetorical techniques. Mr. Bagby transports us back to a time when monsters roamed the earth.

The performance is in the original Anglo-Saxon with supertitles. Professor Mark C. Arnodio delivers a lively and clarifying commentary of the dramatic text.

A previous presentation of Beowulf was reviewed in Artscape Magazine, April 2001 "Lars Lubovitch and Benjamin Bagby's Beowulf: The Fall of the Spoken Word"

.....For seven nights of last January, Benjamin Bagby came to the Orensanz Foundation from Cologne in Germany to face an audience of 300 people. At 8 pm sharp, the lights on the stage centered on a visceral screen that would jolt the rows of academics, students of ancient and Anglo-Saxon dialects and other university bound young souls. At the end of two hours of solid uninterrupted old Anglo-Saxon narrative the audience would exhaust every second of the post performance discussion with questions that seemed to calculate life and death, for everybody in the new gothic space. Is it out there a problem of Anglo Saxon identity?

We are not talking just about nostalgia, of some ancestral common soul, but of a committed search for the genuine self. How is it possible that a dead language that very few individuals can understand, fascinates as deeply as any Broadway drama hardly does. Through the sing songs, the screaming, the threats, the gesturing and the intonations of Benjamin Bugby, the language comes to us as a primal reality, as an object, as and objectual factor. It doesn't depend on our understanding, or our nostalgia. Language breaks in from itself into the audience and manifests a deep solid reality beyond all the individual experiences. .........by Derek Bentley

Artist performer Benjamin Bagby presented a Jon Aron production of the legendary Anglo Saxon poem for an audience of experts and public in general from all over the country.