A Vancouver Early Music Festival presentation. At UBC’s Roy Barnett Recital Hall on Sunday, July 31. No remaining performances

An event that always repays anticipation is Early Music Vancouver’s annual summer festival, particularly when it features Benjamin Bagby and Sequentia.

Antiquarian is too dry a word for an ensemble that re-creates the mysteries of the past with such vivid urgency. This time, as part of an ongoing series of explorations called the Lost Songs Project, the singer looked into the ninth-century court of the emperor Charlemagne in the world premiere of Frankish Phantoms: Echoes From the Carolingian Palaces.

There are good reasons why Charlemagne’s name continues to resonate today. This Frankish king was a hugely important figure politically and in terms of what he achieved in the arts, especially music. Among other things, he virtually invented the concept of Europe.

Personally, he is reported to have been a tall, sturdily built man with imposing white hair. He was kind and civilized but not one to be pushed around, as his doctors found out when they tried to advise him to eat boiled meat instead of the roasted kind that he preferred.

Bagby, Sequentia’s director, sang and played the Germanic harp; Wolodymyr Shmishkewych sang and played the gusli, or Slavic harp, and the organistrum, or hurdy-gurdy; and Norbert Rodenkirchen played flutes and the lyrelike cithara.

Ancient, furious, now–unheard-of battles were re-created, as were death laments and tributes in song to great, powerful, now-forgotten men.

One of Charlemagne’s biggest accomplishments in music was to unify various singing styles into the living collection we now call Gregorian chant. To hear the directness and power of the time’s early monody was incredible, its gravity often belied by the beauty of the words.

There isn’t room to detail the ways in which this amazing re-creation of history held a theatre full of people in thrall. It reminded us that music is an extremely powerful key that opens a great many doors, and in ways that we wouldn’t expect to see. The most moving thing about this concert is that it introduced us to a shared past that many of us didn’t even know we had. Together these magicians supplied an entertainment that was nothing less than bardic.

It effected the miracle of collapsing more than 10 centuries of time.