Blue Heron
Sunday, February 10, 2019, 4 p.m.
Corpus Christi Church
Scott Metcalfe, director
Thirteen-voice choir
The Lost Music of Canterbury
Director Scott Metcalfe loves big, comprehensive projects. He and Boston’s much-praised Blue Heron have released five CDs of music from the Peterhouse Partbooks, significant because some of the parts had been missing for years, rendering entire works unperformable. Thanks to careful scholarship, we’ll hear pieces in premiere by Hugh Aston and Arthur Chamberlayne alongside music of Fayrfax and Taverner.
Post-concert Q and A
“I cannot recommend this superb CD [Vol. 2 of the Peterhouse series] highly enough—it is the sort of recording to listen to in awe at the sustained and unerring skill of the performers and the burgeoning brilliance of the composers… and to shed a quiet tear for the untold treasures that have been lost.”
—Early Music Review (UK)
Estimated Run Time: 90 minutes including one intermission.
Artist Bios and Program
Blue Heron has been acclaimed by The Boston Globe as “one of the Boston music community’s indispensables” and hailed by Alex Ross in the New Yorker for its “expressive intensity.” Committed to vivid live performance informed by the study of original source materials and historical performance practices, Blue Heron ranges over a wide repertory from plainchant to new music, with particular specialities in 15th-century Franco-Flemish and early 16th-century English polyphony. Blue Heron’s first CD, featuring music by Guillaume Du Fay, was released in 2007. In 2010 the ensemble inaugurated a 5-CD series of Music from the Peterhouse Partbooks, including many world-premiere recordings of works copied c. 1540 for Canterbury Cathedral; the fifth disc was released in March 2017 and was selected as a Critic’s Choice of 2017 by Gramophone. Blue Heron’s recordings also include a CD of plainchant and polyphony to accompany Thomas Forrest Kelly’s book Capturing Music: The Story of Notation and the live recording Christmas in Medieval England. Jessie Ann Owens (UC Davis) and Blue Heron won the 2015 Noah Greenberg Award from the American Musicological Society to support a world premiere recording of Cipriano de Rore’s first book of madrigals (1542), planned for release in fall 2019. A recording of the complete songs of Johannes Ockeghem is also in the works.
Founded in 1999, Blue Heron presents a concert series in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and has appeared at the Boston Early Music Festival; in New York City at Music Before 1800, The Cloisters (Metropolitan Museum of Art), and the 92nd Street Y; at the Library of Congress, the National Gallery of Art, and Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C.; at the Berkeley Early Music Festival; at Yale University; and in San Luis Obispo, Seattle, St. Louis, Kansas City, Chicago, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and Providence. The ensemble has also performed in the UK at both Peterhouse and Trinity College in Cambridge and at Lambeth Palace Library, at the London residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Blue Heron has been in residence at the Center for Early Music Studies at Boston University and at Boston College, and has enjoyed collaborations with A Far Cry, Dark Horse Consort, Les Délices, Parthenia, Piffaro, and Ensemble Plus Ultra. In 2015 the ensemble embarked on a multi-season project to perform the complete works of Johannes Ockeghem (c. 1420-1497). Entitled Ockeghem@600, it will wind up around 2021, in time to commemorate the composer’s circa-600th birthday.
John Yannis, manager
blueheron.org
Tickets
20% discount code: peterhouse
Enter the code at the check out.
Individual Tickets
Preferred Center: $50
Center: $42.50
Premium Balcony and Sides: $35
Balcony: $30
Partial View: $15
Balcony Blocked View: $10
Season Subscriptions
Regular Subscription: $180-300
Designer Subscription:$195-310
Mini-Designer Subscription: $105-165
