As Alexander Lingas beheld the shattered remains of San Francisco’s Annunciation Cathedral, devastated in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake a few months earlier, he wanted to help. The singer had moved to the city in June 1990 with his new wife, Ann, a violinist who was studying at the Conservatory of Music. The couple joined the city’s Greek Orthodox Cathedral of the Annunciation, where Lingas, then a musicology graduate student at the University of British Columbia, became lampadarios, or assistant cantor.
Now, as the Annunciation Cathedral lay in ruins, the city’s orthodox community was beginning to figure out how to rebuild — and Lingas wanted to help. For an impoverished graduate student, financial assistance was out of the question. The one thing Lingas could offer was music.
In 1988, he’d formed an early music vocal ensemble during his undergraduate years at Portland State University. The group had sung music of Monteverdi, Schutz, and other Baroque composers. Lingas had also been singing Greek and Byzantine music during church services. He knew how to put together a concert program, and he’d stayed in touch with his fellow singers in the Portland and Vancouver early music circles. In early 1991, he resolved to bring them down to his new home for a concert to benefit the cathedral rebuilding project.
Lingas put together a list of pieces he’d seldom or never heard live. “It was very much a young man’s concert,” Lingas told me in 2011, “with everything but the kitchen sink” — early Byzantine chant, Stravinsky, Rachmaninoff, all the way down to contemporary Orthodox composers John Tavener and San Francisco’s Tikey Zes.
After a debut performance at Portland’s Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox church, the singers piled into a van and headed south. The group needed a name, and to evoke the Byzantine empire’s Roman heritage and the medieval Greek concept of a religious world that embraced Rome and Western Europe as well as the Slavic regions and other lands of the old empire, he called it Cappella Romana — Roman chapel.
In the decades since its founding concerts, the Portland-based professional vocal ensemble has gone on to become the premier exponent and explorer of the musical traditions of Byzantium and other early Christian music, and Lingas one of its leading scholars. He’s found and revived long-dormant repertoire, which the group sings in its original Byzantine and Slavic languages.
And it’s performed music of contemporary European and North American composers who draw on those traditions, such as Arvo Part, Ivan Moody, Michael Adamis, and several North American premieres of Tavener’s works. It’s also showcased one of Lingas’s specialities: polyphonic and harmonized Greek American music brought by Orthodox immigrants over the last century or so and adapted to North American environments, including a West Coast school of contemporary composition in that tradition that includes two CDs each of music by Oregon’s own Robert Kyr, California’s Tikey Zes, and others.
Cappella Romana announced on Thursday morning, Feb. 19, Lingas’s transition to Music Director Emeritus.
“I gathered a group of friends under the name ‘Cappella Romana’ to offer a benefit concert in 1991 representing, in embryonic form, a vision of combining passion with scholarship to explore the musical traditions of the Christian East and West,” he said in a press statement. ”I am deeply grateful to all the artists, staff, board members, volunteers, generous benefactors, and audiences who joined me in cultivating that vision over the last 35 years. It has yielded a bountiful harvest: a world-class ensemble with an international reputation for its broadcasts, commissions and premieres of new works, educational outreach, live performances, recordings, research initiatives, and publications, both pastoral and scholarly.”
The ensemble’s board has appointed its associate music director, John Michael Boyer, interim music director for the 2026-27 season, and will conduct an international search for Lingas’s successor. Currently Protopsaltis (chief cantor) of the Greek Orthodox Metropolis (Diocese) of San Francisco, Boyer followed Lingas as cantor at San Francisco’s Annunciation Cathedral and has worked with Cappella Romana since 1999 as singer, conductor, composer and scholar.
“I am so grateful for the work done by Alexander, not only in creating Cappella Romana, but in growing us into the premier artistic organization for the establishment of Byzantine and Orthodox music in the greater canon of global music,” said CR board president John Paterakis in a press statement. “From the very beginning Cappella Romana was far more than a modest regional organization and made a national and international impact almost immediately. That impact has now expanded considerably with our recording label Cappella Records and Cappella Romana Publishing. He is clearly the leading scholar on Byzantine music in the English-speaking world, and we support his decision to focus now on his important written contributions to the field.”
Portland Origins
Lingas grew up in Portland’s Greek American community. A 1981 choral conference of Greek Orthodox choirs in Portland led him to join his own Orthodox church choir. After graduating from Lincoln High School, he attended Portland State University, initially majoring in physics before ending up with degrees in music and Russian. He also sang with the school’s acclaimed chamber choir and with the venerated Cantor’s in Ecclesia. Major local concerts (including by Portland Baroque Orchestra) featuring music of Handel and Monteverdi ignited his interest in pre-Classical era music.
After moving to Vancouver, British Columbia for graduate study in musicology in 1987, Lingas got involved in that city’s vibrant choral music scene. Singers from that city and Portland comprised the first group of Cappella Romana singers, and the group received important mentorship from Cantores founder Dean Applegate and other Portland music masters.
Although it’s based in Portland and performs several concerts each year there and in Seattle, the group draws singers from around the country, including the Bay Area, and has performed in Europe, Los Angeles, New York City, Canada, and many other cities, with singers chosen as appropriate to the respective shows’ repertoire. Acquaintance with Greek language and Byzantine notation, for example, can be essential to some concerts.
Cappella has augmented its regular Portland and Seattle performances with appearances in churches, cathedrals, colleges, concert halls and museums around the country, often in conjunction with Byzantine art exhibitions or Orthodox religious services, including performances at New York’s Metropolitan Museum, London’s St. Paul’s cathedral, Los Angeles’s Getty Museum, Washington’s Smithsonian Institution, San Francisco, even in their spiritual homeland of Greece.
The ensemble helped Stanford University scientists recreate the celebrated ancient acoustic of the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople (now Istanbul). It’s appeared on National Public Radio, at prestigious early music festivals and toured through Greece, to Rome, Sicily, working with Stanford University acoustic scientists to electronically recreate the sonics of Istanbul’s Hagia Sofia. Earning glowing reviews wherever it sings, Cappella Romana is one of the Northwest’s most accomplished musical institutions.
It’s also made a series of acclaimed recordings and published some of the scores and historical material Lingas and his colleagues have unearthed, as well as scholarly tomes. Along the way, Lingas has received numerous honors and grants for his many academic and musical accomplishments.
Yet Lingas has always insisted on the music’s continuing relevance. “Ancient traditions of music have a contemporary resonance somehow,” he told me. “They manage to reach people in various ways that some people who are from those traditions recognize and appreciate, but also for those who aren’t from them. It’s comparable to blockbuster exhibitions of medieval art like those we’ve accompanied. It’s not at all dry as dust, but it is this fantastically intricate and sophisticated world. We bring it to a wider audience.”
As that debut concert program and subsequent seasons have demonstrated, it’s also quite varied, despite the group’s deserved reputation as nonpareil Byzantine specialists. A glance at its programs and recordings shows music from across the centuries and the continents, from Finland to Crete to Russia to Italy to the U.S. and beyond, much of it by contemporary composers, most of the rest hitherto unavailable to listeners.
“These traditions we’re exploring are so rich that there’s an inexhaustible supply,” Lingas noted, not just because so much ancient music remains to be exhumed, published, recorded and performed, but also because these are living traditions.
The ensemble also achieves contemporary relevance by singing plenty of contemporary and 20th century music.
“We’ve sung composers like Pärt and Tavener and others recognized by modern audiences as having ties to ancient traditions,” he says. “People have found in their music a kind of a window into a wider spiritual world — that there are horizons of the interior that open to them.“
Focusing on Scholarship
As lauded and beloved as Cappella Romana is for its performances and recordings, it’s equally renowned for its scholarship, which after all fuels its music making. “The two things complement each other really well,” Lingas said.
He has pursued that research almost as long as Cappella has been singing it. After returning to Portland for a few years after his San Franciscan sojourn, Lingas moved in 1994 to the London area, where he taught for many years at City University and became a Fellow of the University of Oxford’s European Humanities Research Centre, cranking out scholarly articles and books. His work with Cappella Romana and a teaching stint at Arizona State University helped him earn abundant transatlantic frequent flyer miles.
Now, it’s time “to give priority to scholarship and theological education,” he said in a statement. “I will continue to serve the liturgical and musical traditions of the Christian Roman oikouméne through my affiliations with the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies in Cambridge (UK) and the Institute of Sacred Arts at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary in Yonkers, New York.”
Next month’s concerts, the last Lingas leads as CR artistic director, exemplify that potent combination of scholarship and performance that has made Cappella Romana so compelling. They feature a lost masterpiece that Lingas helped revive: Lithuanian-born composer Maximilian Steinberg’s 1926 Passion Week. Even though Steinberg was a student of Rimsky-Korsakov, teacher of Shostakovich, and director of the Leningrad Conservatory, the Soviet regime’s intensifying crackdown on artists and churches had made it impossible for such sacred music to be sung in Russian Orthodox church services, or even published in its home country.
When he learned of its existence, Lingas (who’d recently completed another musical exhumation, of Byzantine music that had been lost for centuries in ancient Middle Eastern desert monasteries) journeyed to St. Petersburg to examine the composer’s rediscovered original manuscript, and helped prepare a performing edition. That’s how, 87 years after its completion, the last sacred work composed in the Soviet Union had its long-delayed world premiere by Cappella Romana in 2014.
As I wrote in The Wall Street Journal then: “Cappella’s revival of Passion Week on a warm evening at Portland’s St. Mary’s Cathedral supplied the long-delayed final chapter, resurrection. The opening invocation, intoned in Church Slavonic by one of Cappella’s stentorian bass voices, seemed to portend another dose of the ensemble’s usual hieratic Byzantine and Russian austerity. But it was immediately and surprisingly soothed by soaring high harmonies from the all star lineup of sopranos drawn from choir-crazed Portland’s other top choruses and vocal ensembles. In fact, the entire Passion Week, which lasted about an hour, proved surprisingly gentle, sometimes even lush, occasionally delicate, graced by intermittent dissonances and touches of counterpoint.” The March 7 Portland concert also includes an earlier Passion Week setting by another Soviet-era composer, Alexander Gretchaninov.
Though he’ll likely continue to guest conduct some Cappella concerts, this appearance completes a circle and makes a fitting finale to this phase of Alexander Lingas’s history-making career in music. When the organization was celebrating its 25th anniversary, I asked Lingas his thoughts on his lifetime of work with Capella Romana. He was amazed at how expansive that “something that started as a one-off benefit concert” had grown. “My primary feeling is of real gratitude to everyone who has contributed to that journey.”
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Cappella Romana presents Passion for Lifeat 2 p.m. Saturday, March 7, at St. Mary’s Cathedral in Northwest Portland. After the concert, audience members are invited to join Cappella Romana’s celebration of Lingas and the organization’s 35th anniversary at a post-concert reception at the Greek Orthodox Cathedral (3131 NE Glisan Street), where Cappella Romana’s story began.
