Blue Heron Presents “Christmas in Medieval England”
The Beloved Candlelit Holiday Program with Enchanting Vocal Music from the 15th Century Returns for the First Time Since 2017
December 15-16 at First Church in Cambridge, MA
(For Immediate Release, Boston—November 8, 2023) Blue Heron, the Gramophone-award winning vocal ensemble, presents the beloved holiday program, “Christmas in Medieval England,” refreshed and revised with chants, carols, and plainchant to welcome the winter season. Returning for the first time since 2017, the performances take place on December 15 at 8:00 PM, and Saturday, December 16 at 3pm and 8pm at First Church in Cambridge, Congregational.
Artistic director Scott Metcalfe says, “This is a perfect immersive holiday experience to share with family and friends with a delightful blend of well-loved carols and exhilaratingly virtuosic showpieces.”
You will be transported back to the fifteenth century as a group of singers form a circle beneath a glowing golden dome on one of the longest nights of the year, filling a candlelit chancel with the mystical sounds of plainchant. Rollicking carols and the sweet harmonies of English polyphony will evoke the mystery, wonder, and joy of the Christmas season.
With music from the 2015 recording of the same title, The New York Times praised the program, saying, “There’s a deeply affecting edge to the singing, whether in an atmospheric account of the still-familiar “Veni, Veni Emanuel,” or the glorious, elevated Sanctus from the anonymous “Missa Veterem Hominem.”
Boston Classical Review calls this radiant, intimate program “a hauntingly beautiful and uplifting occasion fit for the holidays.”
CALENDAR LISTING
Blue Heron: Christmas in Medieval England
Friday, December 15, 2023, 8:00 PM
Saturday, December 16, 2023, 3:00 PM & 8:00 PM
First Church in Cambridge, Congregational (11 Garden Street, Cambridge)
Tickets $10-$87
https://www.blueheron.org/concerts/season25/english-xmas/
Blue Heron’s well-loved English Christmas program returns after six years, refreshed and revised with new carols, plainchant, and motets, by turns festive, meditative, and spiritual.
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, visit www.blueheron.org.
Media Contact: Stephanie Janes PR, (617) 419-0445, stephanie@stephaniejanespr.com
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