FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Ambitious 7-Year Concert Series Approaches a Close

Award-Winning Blue Heron Ensemble Presents Ockeghem@600: Sine nomine

Friday, March 18, 2022 8:00 pm
Saturday, March 19, 2022 2:30 pm
First Church Cambridge, 11 Garden Street, Cambridge MA
Virtual Concert Release: Friday, April 1, 2022 12:00 pm

Scott Metcalfe, Artistic Director
Contact: Kathleen Brittan, Executive Director
978-395-1145 or kathleen@blueheron.org

 

Ockeghem@600 is Blue Heron’s multi-year project to perform the complete works of Johannes Ockeghem in thirteen programs over the course of seven seasons. Johannes Ockeghem (c. 1420-1497), one of the most celebrated musicians of the 15th century, is one of the greatest composers of all time, every bit the equal of J.S. Bach in contrapuntal technique and profound expressivity and, like Bach, able to combine the most rigorous intellectual structure with a beguiling sensuality. Blue Heron’s Ockeghem concerts are praised as “cerebral, sensitive, and sensual” (Ru, The Boston Musical Intelligencer) in performances “rich and ardent” (Gantz, The Boston Globe).

Blue Heron’s traversal of the complete works of Johannes Ockeghem approaches completion in the 11^th concert of this 13-concert undertaking with a program featuring the so-called Missa sine nomine (“Mass without a name”) for five voices. The cycle, a Missa brevis (“short Mass”) consisting of just three movements, all based on plainchant, is brief indeed, yet in typical Ockeghemian fashion packed full of complexity, surprise, and wit. The program also includes a stand-alone, virtuosic Credo sine nomine, the plangent Salve regina, and a several additional songs by Ockeghem, as well as motets by Heinrich Isaac and Jacob Obrecht and the gorgeous song Quant j’ay au cueur by Busnoys.

Don’t miss this epic repertoire, proclaimed in its time as “most suitable for the immortal gods.” (Tinctoris, Liber de arte contrapuncti of 1477).

Featuring Blue Heron musicians Megan Chartrand, Kim Leeds, Corey Dalton Hart, Jason McStoots, Mark Sprinkle, Sumner Thompson, Paul Guttry, David McFerrin and Scott Metcalfe, artistic director. (pictured in order above)

Free pre-concert talk by Prof. Sean Gallagher (New England Conservatory), 45 minutes prior to each concert.

Please note our COVID safety protocols for in-person attendance at https://www.blueheron.org/covid-19/

 

Tickets for live concerts are $50 for adults, $35 for Seniors, $10 for students or low-income, and include on-line access. Tickets for online-only concerts are $39 for adults, $30 for seniors, $10 for students or low-income. Visit www.blueheron.org/concerts for full details.

 

ABOUT BLUE HERON

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.” The ensemble ranges over a wide repertoire from plainchant to new music, with particular specialties in 15th-century Franco-Flemish polyphony and early 16th-century English sacred music, and is committed to vivid live performance informed by the study of original source materials and historical performance practices. Blue Heron offers a catalog of twelve recordings and is the first group outside of Europe to receive the Gramophone Classical Music Award for Early Music (2018). Blue Heron is Renaissance vocal music for the 21st century. For more information and photos, go to www.bluheron.org

 

ABOUT SEAN GALLAGHER

Prof. Sean Gallagher of the New England Conservatory is a music historian and pianist whose research focuses on music and culture in Italy, France, and the Low Countries during the ‘long’ fifteenth century (ca. 1380–1520). He has published articles on an array of subjects and is the author or editor of five books. Active as a pianist, he regularly presents lecture/recitals on a variety of topics that span much of the history of Western music. He is the recipient of a Ryskamp Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Phi Beta Kappa Prize at Harvard for excellence in teaching, and is the first music historian to be inducted into Johns Hopkins University’s Society of Scholars. He has worked closely with leading vocal ensembles, including The Clerks (dir. Edward Wickham), for whose recording Johannes Regis: Opera omnia he served as advisor. He is musicological advisor for Ockeghem@600, a multi-year project with the award-winning vocal ensemble Blue Heron to perform and record the works of Johannes Ockeghem. He is currently editing the chansons of Firminus Caron, to be published in the series Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae. He serves on the editorial boards of the series Ars nova: nuova