Blue Heron Celebrates its 25th Season with Music From Belgium, France, Italy, and England, Culminating in a Weekend Festival Exploring the Music of Johannes Okeghem as Part of Okeghem@600, a Multi-Season Project to Commemorate the 600th Birthday of the Composer
(For Immediate Release, Boston—September 12, 2023) Blue Heron announces the 2023-24 season–its 25th–with programs of sensuous French songs, dramatic Italian madrigals, and rousing medieval English Christmas music, a weekend-long celebration devoted to the sublime music of Johannes Okeghem, and dazzling singing all year.
The Gramophone Award-winning Blue Heron, led by artistic director Scott Metcalfe, is one of the world’s leading ensembles dedicated to vocal chamber music, acclaimed by Alex Ross in The New Yorker for its “expressive intensity” and described as “beguiling … zesty and sensual” by The New York Times.
Artistic director Scott Metcalfe says, “We invite lovers of chamber music to the concerts of our 25th season, which offer music and programming they won’t hear anywhere else, performed by a dynamic and engaging ensemble of soloists.”
Opening the season on October 14 is Le Rossignol musical / The Musical Nightingale, featuring rarely heard music from Belgium and France. This program presents songs about love & freedom, nightingales and other musical birds from Le Rossignol musical (Antwerp, 1597), by Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, Claude Le Jeune, Andreas Pevernage, Cipriano De Rore, and others – a program premiered at Antwerp’s celebrated Laus Polyphoniae festival in August 2023.
The season continues with a new version of the ensemble’s popular Christmas in Medieval England program in December, refreshed and revised with chants, carols, and plainchant to welcome the holiday season.
The new year welcomes Renaissance Portraits in January–musical portraits of popes and nobles, lovers and spouses, patrons and friends, a cocky cook, and a desperately self-absorbed lover.
Blue Heron’s multi-season exploration of the Italian madrigal continues in March with a new program, Tasso & Wert, featuring settings of dramatic scenes by Torquato Tasso, with music by the great Giaches de Wert and others, and dramatic recitation by speakers Alessandro Quarta (in Italian) and Jade Guerra (in English).
The finale of the season is The World of Johannes Okeghem, a weekend celebration in April of the great Franco-Flemish composer Johannes Okeghem. In 2015 Blue Heron inaugurated Ockeghem@600, a multi-season project to commemorate the circa-600th birthday of the composer by performing his complete works, finishing up in 2023. Blue Heron is at present very likely the only ensemble in the world to have sung every piece written by Okeghem. Building on this unique expertise, the ensemble presents a selection of the master’s very best in the context of music by his contemporaries and colleagues. The Saturday afternoon concert is the centerpiece of a weekend-long celebration including public talks, master classes, and a pub concert featuring Belgian beers and cuisine along with songs.
A parallel project to record all of Okeghem’s songs bore its first fruits in 2019 with the release of Johannes Ockeghem: Complete Songs, Volume I, which was named to the Bestenliste of the Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik; the release of Volume 2 will follow later this season.
For more information and to purchase tickets, visit www.blueheron.org/concerts.
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