November 4, 2020
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Award-Winning Blue Heron Presents Mehmet Ali Sanlıkol: Renaissance Polyphony & Turkish Makam
Wednesday, November 18, 7:00 pm via Zoom
Scott Metcalfe, Artistic Director
Contact: Kathleen Brittan, Executive Director
978-395-1145 or kathleen@blueheron.org
The first of Blue Heron’s newly created Spotlight Sessions will feature a taste of Many Voices, our March 2020 concert now rescheduled for the 2021-2022 season. Composer Mehmet Ali Sanlıkol will provide an introduction to the Turkish modes (makam), how makam compares to the modes of Western European music, and how makam may be used in polyphonic composition.
This event will be held live on Zoom, then recorded and posted (password protected) for ticket purchasers.
Tickets are $35 for adults, $10 for students or low-income:
https://www.blueheron.org/spotlight-sessions/sanlikol/
An email with links and instructions will be sent 48 hours in advance of each concert.
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. With a catalog of twelve recordings, Blue Heron 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.
ABOUT MEHMET ALI SANLIKOL
Grammy-nominated composer and New England Conservatory faculty member Mehmet Ali Sanlıkol hails from Cyprus and Turkey. A jazz pianist, multi-instrumentalist, and singer, Sanlıkol has been praised by critics all over the world for his unique, pluralist, multicultural and energetic musical voice. The Boston Globe noted that Sanlıkol’s “music is colorful, fanciful, full of rhythmic life, and full of feeling. The multiculturalism is not touristy, but rather sophisticated, informed, internalized; Sanlıkol is a citizen of the world … who could play decisive role in music’s future.” Sanlıkol has composed for and performed with international stars and ensembles including Dave Liebman, Bob Brookmeyer, Anat Cohen, Esperanza Spalding, Billy Cobham, Antonio Sanchez, Gil Goldstein, Tiger Okoshi, The Boston Camerata, The Boston Cello Quartet, A Far Cry, American Composers Orchestra, Okay Temiz, Erkan Oğur, and Brenna MacCrimmon, as well as his own ensembles DÜNYA and Whatsnext? Mehmet Ali Sanlıkol is the composer of Devran, a two-movement work for voices setting 16th-century Sufi texts using the techniques of Renaissance-style polyphony combined with aspects of traditional Turkish music. Blue Heron would have performed Devran in its concert Many Voices on March 28, 2020. The program will be rescheduled for the 2021-22 season. https://www.sanlikol.com/
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