October 4, 2021
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Ockeghem@600, Concert 10: Missa quinti toni with Award-Winning Ensemble Blue Heron (Scott Metcalfe, Artistic Director)
Friday, October 15, 2021 at 8:00 pm; Saturday, October 16, 2021 at 2:30 pm
First Church in Cambridge, Congregational, 11 Garden Street, Cambridge MA
Free pre-concert talk by Prof. Sean Gallagher (New England Conservatory) 45 minutes prior to each performance
Contact: Kathleen Brittan, Executive Director
978-395-1145 or kathleen@blueheron.org
Blue Heron launches its 23rd season with the tenth program in its series Ockeghem@600, presenting the complete works of Johannes Ockeghem (c. 1420-1497). Ockeghem was one of the most celebrated musicians of the 15th century and one of the greatest composers of all time, every bit the equal of J.S. Bach. His music is at once profoundly expressive, beguilingly sensual, and technically astonishing. This program features the Missa quinti toni for three voices, the brilliant motet Alma redemptoris mater, and a handful of secular songs, together with other music by Ockeghem’s contemporaries Johannes Regis and Antoine Busnoys.
Prof. Sean Gallagher of New England Conservatory, one of the world’s leading experts on 15th-century music and musicological advisor for Ockeghem@600, will present a live pre-concert talk 45 minutes before each performance.
Both the pre-concert talk and the concert will be filmed for online viewing, available one week after the performance.
Advance purchase tickets for live concerts (also including on-line access) are $39-83 for adults, $30 for seniors, $10 for students or low-income. Tickets for online-only concerts are $39 for adults, $30 for seniors, $10 for students or low-income.
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 first group outside of Europe to receive the Gramophone Classical Music Award for Early Music (2018). Blue Heron’s 2019 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).
ABOUT SEAN GALLAGHER
Prof. Sean Gallagher of the New England Conservatory is a music historian and pianist whose research focuses on music and culture in Italy, France, and the Low Countries during the ‘long’ fifteenth century (ca. 1380–1520). He has published articles on an array of subjects and is the author or editor of five books. Active as a pianist, he regularly presents lecture/recitals on a variety of topics that span much of the history of Western music. He is the recipient of a Ryskamp Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Phi Beta Kappa Prize at Harvard for excellence in teaching, and is the first music historian to be inducted into Johns Hopkins University’s Society of Scholars. He has worked closely with leading vocal ensembles, including The Clerks (dir. Edward Wickham), for whose recording Johannes Regis: Opera omnia he served as advisor. He is musicological advisor for Ockeghem@600, a multi-year project with the award-winning vocal ensemble Blue Heron to perform and record the works of Johannes Ockeghem. He is currently editing the chansons of Firminus Caron, to be published in the series Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae. He serves on the editorial boards of the series Ars nova: nuova collana (published by Libreria Musicale Italiana) and I Codici di Trento (published by Istituto Italiano per la Storia della Musica).
