This programme is the fruit of an erudite investigation led by Katarina Livljanić : prayers (from the Book of Radoslav), incantations (Glava Hr'stova), excommunications (Koli že krešten ne budet), exorcisms (Zaklinam tebe, prinecisti dusce), meditations orchestrate a programme based on the individual polarity of life/death and, more largely, creation/destruction. The itinerary is also structured by declamations drawn from the tombs, in the manner of an ancient choir, as we learn from the libretto: a harsh polyphony in the ganga style, marked by chromatic effects and microtonality. (…) Since the sources are virtually silent on the musical dimension, these evocations are based on the vocal practices that survive in orality. A laboratory where paganism is not missing from this melting pot, and where spirituality is imbued with folkloric elements.

The variety of sounds and sound effects (the spatial echo of Bože, davno ti sam legao) help to immerse us in this field of mysteries and symbolisms around primitive existential questions emanating from the Balkan soil and its complex, yet fertile, religious dynamics.

Ancestral, archetypal music that resonates from a distant era and seems to evoke rituals of primitive, borderless sacredness. This is where Katarina Livljanić and herensemble Dialogos bring us, as is now customary, exploring the Slavic repertoires of the past, and seeking a truth - artistic and spiritual - inviting us to follow inaccessible and little travelled paths. (…) The atmosphere and sounds are traditional, rough and rugged, making an extremely evocative listening experience, as in the energetic Kad se duša stilon dili or the Dies irae sequence, here entrusted to a traditional Bosnian archaic melody (Dan od gnjiva).

(...) An admirable feat of strength with enormous commitment and love for this country and history that led to this unusual album (...).

(…)Katarina Livljanić has deeply studied the texts of ancient rituals about life and death, creation and destruction of the world. Medieval and traditional musicians have united their forces in this almost laboratory experience. From the evocation of angels to exorcisms, they draw inspiration from polyphonic forms that still exist in today's vocal practices. Often rough and potent, playing with contrasts of all kinds (homophony and melismas, intertwining of voices and instruments), this music combines striking atmospheres in a discourse reminiscent of a Greek chorus. A spellbinding journey.

Drawing on the diversity, customs, languages and religious cults of medieval Bosnia, this project is conceived as a journey through rites (…). The ensemble successfully combines genres and techniques: litanies and incantations performed with fluidity between song and declamation (Glava Hr'stova), alternating homophony and melisma, dialogue effects, contrasting tessitura and textures (Iskoni bje slovo, Zaklinam tebe), imitative writing (Oce nas), voices and instruments interweaving (Koli ze kresten ne budet), a capella (I znamenie velie) or epic solo singing (Pisma od taste slave)... Medieval flutes, rebec and fiddle stand alongside the traditional dvojnice (double flute) and gusle (monochord used to accompany epic song). The pieces follow one another without ressembling one another, unfolding a narrative in which the text is sculpted down to the smallest detail. In the manner of an ancient choir, funerary inscriptions are interpreted in polyphony.

This is a weird, eerie, and really quite wonderful collection of music that was inspired by "mystical inscriptions on ancient Bosnian tombstones." Having been inspired by these inscriptions, Katarina Livljanić, director of the Dialogos ensemble, conducted research into Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian manuscript archives in which she found "remnants of pagan beliefs... often infused into the Christian context." What does the music sound like? Unsurprisingly, it's spare and dark, sometimes featuring solo voices, sometimes folk instruments, and sometimes multiple voices in astringent harmony. There will be elements here that sound familiar to those immersed in Eastern Orthodox liturgical music and to those who have spent time with Eastern European folksong, but I promise this album overall will sound like nothing you've heard before.

Katarina Livljanić - singer, medievalist and creator of Dialogos – explores a surprising medieval Bosnia, rich in Catholic, Orthodox, heretical Bosnian Christian, Jewish and Muslim traditions and religions. Taking as their starting point ancient funerary inscriptions (stećci) – in which the dead address the living in concise texts and incantations collected from Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian manuscripts – musicians imagine a narrative thread full of "Heretic Angels". Dialogos also reunites with the no less expert Croatian choir Kantaduri, with whom it recorded songs from the Adriatic (CD Dalmatica, 2016), as well as Jure Miloš, singer and player of several traditional string instruments. Kantaduri's guttural, polyphonic voices and impressive dissonant effects (ganga) lend intensity to this mystical chant from the depths of the ages. A "direct, sometimes rude expression (...) inhabited by a multitude of angels, good, bad or fallen" that Dialogos associates with a single female voice, that of its illustrious founder, accompanied by Norbert Rodenkirchen's flutes and Albrecht Maurer's rebec. With Dialogos, medieval time is recomposed ad infinitum.

Medieval sources interweave with traditional and ancient melodies reconstructed by Katarina Livljanic's deep knowledge of this repertoire. Despite the diversity of the musical materials, the rare coherence of the proposal and the close conceptual cohesion of the programme, which moves through the different pieces as if they were a narrative, is surprising.

A new milestone in the unique discography of Katarina Livljanić, who collaborates here with the impressive group of traditional voices Kantaduri, led by the no less extraordinary singer Joško Ćaleta.

Energetic Katarina Livljanić and her Ensemble Dialogos (whose concert, presented in a simple theatrical mode, featured ancient epitaphs of Dalmatia and Herzegovina in which the dead speak to the living) (…). All had in common the absence of artifice, restoring to music the first and last word.

Ensemble Dialogos, directed by Katarina Livljanic, focuses on the musical past of the Balkans. However, the performance at the festival was not just about 'early music', as Livljanic emphasized in her introduction (…). In this programme most music was part of a still living tradition, handed down orally from one generation to the next. This music differs greatly from what we in Western Europe consider to be 'early music', both in terms of melody and harmony (…). Livljanic had quite rightly chosen a theatrical setting and that was precisely what made for an extremely fascinating experience, in which the lyrics and the events to which they refer came to life. The texts were projected on the wall; that was essential to understand what it was about. There is no need to talk about 'interpretation' here. In a way the source of the music was involved in the performance: the traditional chants were sung by Kantaduri, an ensemble that devotes itself to the musical traditions with which the singers partly grew up themselves.

As Atlas bearing the weight of the world, Milivoj Rilov's bass voice, whose typically Slavonic bell and drum offers an uncountable variations of harmonics, raises the Balkan voices of Josko Caleta, Nikola Damjanovic and Srecko Damjanovic to the summit, these voices born from the encounter between the finest subtleties of Oriental inflections, the depth of the Slavonic harmonics and the warm agility of the Mediterranean voices. Single female voice, Katarina Livljanic fully dedicates her prosodic chant to the incantatory emotion that she draws in the manuscripts of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Finally, Jure Milos sings - accompanied by the gusle - with this acute and guttural voice which evokes the vocal intensity so dear to the Ottoman tradition. One cannot help be struck by these heretical angels of Dialogos & Kantaduri who prodigiously [tend to] the keystone of the East and the West - the origins of the Balkan civilization - lost in the limbo of forgotten memory.

"….a transfixing meditation on mortality conceived by the singer-scholar Katarina Livljanic…In a dance of the living and the dead, [the music] therefore had to be recomposed, using medieval manuscripts and oral customs, for instruments including the rebec, the gusle and the dvojnice. The songs themselves are musically bracing, particularly when sung in ganga, an intensely dissonant multi-part style from the Dalmatian hinterland.. a ritual that alternated solo songs with choral interludes in a simple staging by Sanda Herzic that effectively used the chapel's aisles and choir loft…. Ms. Livljanic's pure voice had an incantatory power, not least in a chanted reading from the Book of Revelation, and there was an energy in Kantaduri's singing..."

"The result is breathtaking. (...) The score, created on the basis of fragmentary musical notation and traditional music material, reveals a coherent approach and deep originality. Impressive in its sobriety, which exudes a chiaroscuro effect intensified by splendid lighting, the programme emphasizes the contrasts between men's and a woman's voice (…). An organic, more than cerebral mysticism, is illustrated in an Orthodox-like musical style, by the powerful voices of the Kantaduri singers, alternating rich polyphony and wild incantations. Between a dark male choir and a clear female voice, the dialogue develops with solemnity, humility and dignity."

"The magnitude of Heretical Angels is not an hour-long presentation of ancient languages, creeds, mantras and music. Its importance lies in the fact that medieval music specialist Katarina Livljanic, her "Dialogos" ensemble and the "Kantaduri" ensemble, have attempted - and very well succeeded - in bringing its audience to the beginnings of human time itself."

"Ms. Livljanic had produced an epic of magic and revelation. It was the great French philosopher Antonin Artaud who wrote so expressively about theater as magic–magic language, magic gestures, magic words and music from the earth. His example was Balinese theater, which itself predates both Hinduism and Islam. Ms. Livljanic has created a religion which is liturgically antediluvian. And those of us open to its ecstatic spell may have caught a shadowy glimpse of our own still-pulsing, Divine Breath."

Like all of Katarina Livljanic's projects, the programme "Heretical Angels" is not an ordinary early music concert, but a performance touching the audience's ears, eyes and souls through medieval texts. Voices meet and collide, harsh as rugged mountains, like wailing souls, torn between life and death, earth and sky, time and eternity. The "Dies irae" sequence, sung with an archaic Bosnian traditional melody, is spine-chilling. Everything is extraordinary in this programme. Katarina Livljanić, Dialogos, Joško Ćaleta, Jure Miloš and Kantaduri remind us of an archaic, original, tough and yet beautifully strong and moving world: it is driven by the music and language of high wisdom. These musicians awakened and moved many souls.