By Style

Here is a listing of our programs organized by style.

Medieval
Renaissance
Baroque
Christmas
New World
Special Projects

The Nights Tale, as staged and directed by Artistic Director Anne Azéma, is not a decorous concert of early music. Its a theater piece, with lights, movement, gesture, and lively interaction among the cast members. The Boston Globe called it something hot raucous, gleeful, impulsive, rowdy. A leading French critic says that it may well alter the way we look at the Middle Ages.

The Ludus Danielis, or Play of Daniel, is a powerful medieval mystery play composed eight centuries ago in Beauvais, France.

The Boston Camerata’s recent new production of The Play of Daniel, edited, staged and directed by Anne Azéma, renews and transforms this classic work of early music theater. It brings together music and movement, theater and liturgy, light and shadow, to retell the biblical story of the young prophet for today’s audiences. Acclaimed by the public and selected as “best of the year” by Boston critics, Camerata’s Daniel is now being offered for a 2016 tour.

“Lyrical and poignant … timeless spiritual message.” – The Boston Globe

“Unexpected energy and immediacy … memorable” – The Boston Musical Intelligencer

“Enchanting … a pure delight” – The Boston Classical Review

The Boston Camerata returns to one of the great masterpieces of Medieval musical art, the monumentalMesse de Notre Dameof Guillaume de Machaut (ca. 1300 1377)…

Sung by a celestial trio of female voices, accompanied by vielles and harp, Heaven’s Gate opens the portals to an abundant treasure of song in French…

About two years before he composed his famous Mass, the aging master and churchman Guillaume de Machaut fell in love with the too-young noblewoman Pronne d’Armentire…

The Kings of France were crowned at Reims, and a majestic Gallery of Kings dominates the Cathedral’s faade. This program of medieval music and poetry sings of David, Salomon, Arthur, Marc Alfonse, Rodolp, Thibaut…

The Distant Haven: Voyage and Encounter In Medieval France

Music and poetry recounting legendary quests, spiritual pilgrimage, and chivalric adventure: beautiful chants,songs and lais of the troubadours and trouvres…

An exploration of the eternal feminine in the Middle Ages, via songs and poems around two women named Mary: Mary Magdalen, the repentant sinner and intimate of Christ and Mary the Mother, source of grace and mercy to the human race.

Some historians see the late Middle Ages as a waning period. Here at the Camerata, we hear incredible beauty, sensuality, and tenderness in the magnificent music of Dufay, Binchois, Josquin, and other…

“Tristan and Iseult,” Camerata’s most honored production of recent seasons, was originally conceived as a recording project.

At the request of Erato records, intense literary and musical research took place during winter and spring 1987.

Much of the music you are about to hear was produced in the saddest and most shamefully cruel corners of old Europe – its ghettos. Yet the Jews and Christians, though forced to live apart, were in many ways…

Astonishing in their diversity and grace, the circa-four thousand poems of the Occitanian and Catalan troubadours survive by the forsight of a few enlightened patrons who, sensing the end of an epoch, began…

In the year 1310 manuscript copies of a scurrilous satirical poem, the Roman de Fauvel, began circulating around Paris. Corrosive, pitiless, the poet, a mid-level government functionary named Gervais de Bus…

Every since the middle ages, the troubadours of Provence have exerted a special kind of fascination for historians, poets, and lovers of music and literature. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries…

The ages-old manuscript, that lay in the vaults of the Benediktbeuren monastery in Bavaria, did not begin with the usual devotions. On the contrary, the opening song — meant as some satirical mime, or a dance perhaps…

High among the many achievements of the Spanish King Alfonso X, called “El Sabio” — the Wise (1221-1284) is the superb collection of more than 400 sacred songs to the Virgin Mary, the celebrated Cantigas de Santa Maria.

anne azema

This program of old French music and poetry explores a very important but-little known aspect of the Middle Ages: the art of story-telling. Centuries ago, the frontier between the musical and literary worlds was much…

Love is a game, and every game has its rules. In medieval France, the rules are new and give the woman, the dame, a novel status. And the game of love, thus played out with the consent of all those involved, takes…

The region now referred to as the south of France was in the Middle Ages known as Proenza (that is, Provence), and was truly a crucible of creative activity that was to change for ever the relationship between men…

This is not the first CD to explore music devoted to the Virgin Mary, but it’s unquestionably one of the most beautifully conceived and performed. French soprano Anne Azéma
and Berkeley-based string player Shira Kammen breathe warmth and humanity…

In 1285 a French minstrel wrote down an eyewitness account describing a magnificent courtly celebration in the Lorraine region of France. The songs, dances, and games described in his text have inspired this delightful production.

Vieni Imeneo! Marriage and Music in the Italian Renaissance

A musical invocation of Hymen, Roman god of marriage! At the intersection of family power, pomp, religion, and raging youthful hormones, the celebration of marriage in Italy ca. 1500-1600 produced, among other things, an incredibly rich harvest of magnificent music.

A Symphony Of Psalms: Honoring Jean Calvin

Camerata presents a garland of psalm settings across the centuries, with special attention to Renaissance Europe, the birthplace of Protestantism. The musical settings will be grouped around important themes/motifs of the texts…

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Series

This series of three Italian Renaissance concert programs, originally commissioned by the Gardner Museum, Boston, around their special exhibitions, is now available for touring. These programs are available individually and as a group…

We salute the CD reissue, on Harmonia Mundi HMA 1901034, of a classic Boston Camerata program, recorded in France in 1979.

Review of John Dowland: Farewell Unkind ( Erato CD)
from Le Monde de la Musique (Paris, France), May 1996
rating: Choc (highest possible)…

Like all true Latins, the French have always adored a good show. The splendors of opera and ballet at the court of seventeenth-century Versailles were famous all over Europe in their day — and this century’s “early music” revival in France…

Want to hear some wonderful songs that the real Shakespeare probably knew? Check out this wonderful Boston Camerata CD, an anthology of ravishing vocal and instrumental pieces from Elizabethan England, featured in…

The words you will be hearing on this recording are sung in Hebrew, a language evolved and first sopken in the Holy Land; yet the music which accompanies
these liturgical texts is European through and through…

The name of Jean Gilles, which had been forgotten for more than a century and a half, emerged from obscurity in the 1950’s, thanks largely to the rediscovery of his Messe des Morts. Yet this musician, whom his contemporaries considered to be…

Joel Cohen may well be the best precisely where, a priori, you least expect him to be. If anyone is a many-faceted talent, it is surely he, since he undertakes, with the Boston Camerata, seven centuries of music, including, a few years back…

A rich holiday celebration from the Spanish speaking parts of the globe: from Spain…

“Beautifully crafted” – Musiccriticism.com
3 CD box set.

The midwinter date of the festival of Christ’s nativity coincides with many pagan celebrations of the winter solstice, and most particularly with the Roman Dies sol invictus (“the day of the unconquered sun”)…

An extremely rich recording, procuring constant enchantment on repeated hearings. Once more, the intelligence of Joel Cohen and his musicians ravishes us. The voices are superb, among others those of Anne Azéma
… -Compact (Paris)

The Boston Camerata has pioneered in the rediscovery of American musical roots. We propose, for our moment in history, a unique communal celebration, including some of the best that we as a nation have to offer.

American civilisation came in large part from old Europe. So we all know — but do we? For the myth of modern, industrial America, that brand-new, technology-driven, rootless place is strong in the contemporary mind. American music…

This is a recording about a surprising phenomenon: The vigorous survival, in the Northern part of the United States, of folk-inspired religious hymnody. It is well known that the “folk” element in American church…

The Age of Exploration! In our school days, we were told it was a time of heroes, and of high adventure. Later, we came to understand what terrible suffering and injustice the Spaniards had wrought in their drive for fame…

As urban America of the nineteenth century grew and prospered, it became anxious to show itself civilized and “cultured” along the lines of established European culture. And so it was that the music of America’s…

Our view of the American past is shaped by many things — dimly remembered history lessons from our earliest school days; the posturings of present-day public people; and, perhaps most importantly, by the popular media…

The United Society of Believers, commonly known as the Shakers, have best been described as a Protestant Monastic Community. An old hymn of ours states “at Manchester in England this blessed fire began”…

Sabbathday Lake, Maine (about half an hour north and west of Portland) is home to the world’s last functioning Shaker community. Despite that solitary-sounding description, Chosen Land is a vital, cheerful, and active place…

This stunning music and dance production integrates authentic Shaker music, sung by the Boston Camerata, with audacious modern dance from the Tero Saarinen Dance Company. Borrowed Light has been performed more than sixty times in Europe, North America, and Australasia since its 2004 premire, generating cheers and ovations at almost every venue. Further touring plans are underway for performances in Europe and America in 2013, 2014, and 2015. An extensive pressbook is available on request to interested presenters.

Alexander the Great: Hero, Warrior and Lover

Alexander’s deeds, both real and legendary,
inspired bardic poetry and song both East and West.

Alla Turca: Europe And The Ottomans 1400-1800

Four centuries of curiosity and emulation as Turks and Europeans engage with each others manners and music! The Dnya ensemble, featuring an array of traditional Turkish instruments, joins with the singers…

The Boston Camerata 2016

Anne Azéma, Artistic Director

By Style

Like this:

Share this:

Like this: