Guest Artist | Blue Heron

Event time: 
Friday, October 18, 2013 - 1:30pm to 3:30pm
Location: 
Marquand Chapel See map
409 Prospect St.
New Haven, CT 06511
Admission: 
Free
Open to: 
General Public
Event description: 

Music for Canterbury Cathedral

Scott Metcalfe, music director


Blue Heron is a professional vocal ensemble that combines a commitment to vivid live performance with the study of original source materials and historical performance practice. Blue Heron’s principal repertoire interests are fifteenth-century English and Franco-Flemish polyphony, ranging from Dunstable and Du Fay through Ockeghem to Josquin; Spanish music between about 1500 and 1575; and neglected early sixteenth-century English music, especially the rich and unexplored repertory of the Peterhouse partbooks (c. 1540). Founded in 1999, Blue Heron presents its own series of concerts in Cambridge, Massachusetts and New York City; it has appeared as part of the Boston Music Festival, travelled all over the Northeast, and sung at the Festival Mozaic in San Luis Obispo, California. In 2009 Blue Heron presented the opening concert of the Boston Early Music Festival Concert Series and ended the season with a performance at the Connecticut Early Music Festival. Last season the ensemble performed with Piffaro in Philadelphia, at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC, and on the Music Before 1800 series in New York City. This season they will appear at the Cloisters in New York City and on the Renaissance and Baroque series in Pittsburgh, PA.

Blue Heron’s first CD, featuring music by Guillaume Du Fay, was released in 2007, to wide critical acclaim. A second CD, of music from the Peterhouse partbooks by Aston, Jones and Mason, was released in 2010. The Aston recording has received high praise from reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic, was featured in an article by Alex Ross in The New Yorker discussing new developments in the performance of Renaissance polyphony (January 10, 2011), was recently named WGBH’s CD of the month, and hit the Billboard chart.