MEDIA ADVISORY
Blue Heron Photo Opportunity – Open Rehearsal for The Armed Archangel
Thurs. Jan. 30, 2pm to 4pm, in Cambridge
Contact: Bobby Pape, executive director
617-960-7956 (office) · 585-739-6265 (cell)
bobby@blueheron.org
The Boston-based early music vocal ensemble Blue Heron, directed by Scott Metcalfe, invites you to an Open Rehearsal for The Armed Archangel, Johannes Regis’s Missa L’homme armé. The work will later be performed on Blue Heron’s subscription series on Saturday, Feb. 1, in Cambridge, and in a special performance on Sunday, Feb. 2, in New York City. Regis’s Mass based on the song L’homme armé is one of the very first in a series of L’homme armé works stretching across musical generations – and the only one whose origins are clearly understood. Written for the celebration of the feast of St. Michael at Cambrai Cathedral in 1462, the Mass is a tour de force setting multiple plainchant cantus firmi and featuring Regis’s brilliant and unique sense of sonority.
WHO: Blue Heron professional singers and Artistic Director Scott Metcalfe
WHAT: A rehearsal for The Armed Archangel featuring an audience of invited donors and patrons
WHERE: First Church in Cambridge, Congregational, 11 Garden Street, Cambridge. (Harvard Sq.)
WHEN: Thursday, Jan. 30, from 2pm to 4pm
WHY: To capture Blue Heron, the only group outside of Europe to receive the Gramophone
Classical Music Award for Early Music, in a working rehearsal for this rarely heard masterwork that helped shape the sound of the Renaissance
ABOUT THE CONCERTS
The Armed Archangel: Johannes Regis, Missa L’homme armé
Saturday, Feb. 1, 3pm, at First Church in Cambridge, Congregational, 11 Garden Street, Cambridge MA
Tickets: $10-90 (Cambridge) and $10-$100 (NYC) at (617) 960-7956 and blueheron.org. (Free tickets are available to those or whom income is a barrier to accessing the arts.)
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, wound up in March 2023, 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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