FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Blue Heron Announces Its 24th Season
Contact: Kathleen Brittan, Executive Director
978-395-1145 or kathleen@blueheron.org
Blue Heron kicks off its 24th season on October 15, 2022 with Requiem, the twelfth program in our multi-season traversal of Johannes Ockeghem’s complete works, Ockeghem@600. One of the master’s most celebrated and mysterious creations, his Requiem – the earliest surviving polyphonic setting of the Mass for the Dead – will be performed along with motets composed in his honor by Antoine Busnoys and Lupus Hellinck (or Johannes Lupi).
The holiday season brings three performances of Christmas in Renaissance Spain, on December 16 at 8 pm and December 17 at 3 pm and 8 pm. Join us for this festive new program of sonorous motets, exuberant villancicos, and comic ensaladas for the Christmas season, with singers, guitar, percussion, and dulcian.
Looking toward spring and warmer days, on February 11, 2023 we invite you to enjoy a program we presented for the festival Laus Polyphoniae in Antwerp in 2021 on the themes of Fortuna and Fama (rumour, reputation): Josquin Desprez’s sunny mass based on the song Fortuna desperata and a group of settings of Dido’s last words, Dulces exuvie, by Josquin, De Orto, Agricola, Mouton, and others.
The final installation in our complete-works project Ockeghem@600, on March 25, 2023, features some of the composer’s most moving pieces – the Missa Mi mi, the motet Intemerata dei mater, and the song Presque transi – as well as Josquin’s famous lament for Ockeghem, Nymphes des bois.
We conclude our season on April 29, 2023 with Songs and Dances for Isabella: Courtly music from Mantua & Ferrara. Blue Heron will be joined by a pair of outstanding medieval instrumentalists – fiddle player Anna Danilevskaia (Switzerland) and multi-instrumental virtuosa Debra Nagy (Cleveland) – in a program of music connected to Isabella d’Este and the Este and Gonzaga families, circa 1500.
New This Year! Concerts will take place on Saturday afternoons at 3 pm. The December program will be presented three times: Friday at 8 pm and Saturday at 3 pm and at 8 pm. All concerts, with the exception of the December program, include a free pre-concert talk 45 minutes before each performance.
We also continue our popular Spotlight Sessions, online talks and conversations that provide in-depth explorations of topics in early music, followed by Q&A.
For ticket information, please go to www.blueheron.org/concerts.
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 only group outside of Europe to receive the Gramophone Classical Music Award for Early Music (2018). Blue Heron’s CD Johannes Ockeghem: Complete Songs,Volume I was named to the first Bestenliste (Quarterly Critics’ Choice) of 2020 by the prestigious Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik (German Record Critics’ Award). Its multi-season project to perform the complete works of the great 15th-century composer Johannes Ockeghem, Ockeghem@600, winds up this season, making Blue Heron the only ensemble in North America, quite possibly anywhere in the world, to have accomplished this feat.
For more information and photos, go to www.blueheron.org.
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