…but it didn’t stop our final performance of the December, 2009 Christmas tour, last Sunday at Back Bay’s First Lutheran Church. All of us were delighted to see the sanctuary filled to capacity, despite the blustery weather outside. And it really felt like “family” to be able to celebrate the holiday all together, with warm and spicy Mediterranean sounds, while the Northern snow continued to accumulate….

Meanwhile, the Boston Globe weighed in on this year’s production, calling it “delightful” and “utterly absorbing” (Just for the record books, in December there were standing ovations for Camerata and the Sharq ensemble at eight of the nine national venues, including at First Lutheran).

For those unable to attend the performance on Sunday, December 20, due to the snowstorm, The Boston Camerata is offering an exchange to one of its spring productions. Please contact Annie Houston via email, or by phone at 617-262-2092, to facilitate the exchange.

So waxed the critic of the Schenectady Times-Union in the wake of Camerata’s Sunday concert at Union College. Two thirds of this national tour are now history, but New Englanders still have three opportunities to hear some magnificent holiday music: December 18 in Providence, December 19 in Newbury, December 20 in Boston. Some good seats are still available at all venues. Run, don’t walk!

That’s how the critic of the online journal SanDiego.com described our performance of A Mediterranean Christmas last Monday, in the small, charming La Jolla church of Saint James. That intimate evening was sandwiched between appearances in two much larger halls, first in Los Angeles and lastly in Houston. Bravos and ovations greeted our terrific musicians everywhere. We’re glad to be back East for three further concerts this coming weekend (Lexington, Cambridge, and Schenectady, New York). You can read the San Diego review at here.

But for the best experience of all, please join us at one of the upcoming live performances!

Convinced by a fantastic performance of the “Tagen Alter Musik”

“An evocative return in sound to the Middle Ages with the Boston Camerata… Twenty years ago the Boston Camerata caused a sensation with “Tristan and Isolde” as a medieval opera. That production’s inspiring Isolde is their new current director, Anne Azéma. The music is, to be sure, a montage of various sources from the 12th to 14th centuries. But thanks to first-class singers, who were sensitively accompanied by vielle, flute, cornetto, harp and rebec, there arose a sonic spell of love, from which no listener could escape.”

— Klaus Lipinski, Ruhr Nachrichten, November 16, 2009

“The ovation just went on and on. It seemed endless.” That’s a quote captured a few days ago, at Boston’s Logan airport, from the eyewitness account of a returning Camerata musician. She was describing the reaction of the audience in Germany, the previous day, at the end of Camerata’s “Tristan and Iseult” performance.

The November festival concert of Camerata’s now-legendary “Tristan” script was a commission from the German radio, the Westdeutsche Rundfunk, and the recent performance will be broadcast in Germany on December 7. Thanks to all who made it work so well, including new cast members Jean Lorrain (Gottfried, the Poet/Narrator) and Jennifer Ellis (Brangane). In our photo, you see Aaron Engebreth and Tristan, and Anne Azéma (who also directed) as Iseult.

In the days following “Tristan,” Anne and viellist Susanne Ansorg teamed up to teach three days of master classes at the Tilburg conservatory, Netherlands. The subject, closely related to the concert of only a few days before: German song of the Middle Ages. This is a very busy fall for Anne and her colleagues.

Following a successful French tour in early 2008, Camerata’s world-famous production of “Tristan & Iseult” returns to Germany on Friday, November 13, 16:00, as part of the Herne Festival. The fabulous texts of Gottfried von Strassburg will be read and sung in the original medieval German, and Anne Azéma participates both as Iseult the Blond and as the director of a stellar international cast. If you know our “Tristan” from the 1987 CD, you will be surprised by how much the production has evolved, and grown, in the intervening years. For more information, please click here.

For those of you who cannot attend the concert, it will be recorded for later broadcast. But come, if you can.

November was harvest month for Boston Camerata musicians. As they performed “A Symphony of Psalms” around the country, they harvested ovation after ovation. Audiences at every venue – in Michigan, Missouri, Iowa and Massachusetts – rose spontaneously to their feet at each concert’s end, to salute the superb interpretations of Renaissance and early Baroque psalmody.

Your intrepid reporter was present at the final event of the tour, last Sunday’s beautiful Cambridge performance, and noted that Harvard’s Memorial Church hosted a large and raptly attentive audience. Continue reading →

Our undercover agent in Grand Rapids, Michigan, informs us that the première performance of Camerata’s fall production, “A Symphony of Psalms,” was greeted with a standing ovation. The event took place at Calvin College, a distinguished institution whose roots in the Dutch Reformation, and therefore in psalmody, run deep. Anne Azéma and the Camerata crew, seventeen strong, were delighted with the warm welcome (it’s a return engagement for us at this school), and with the enthusiastic participation of Calvin’s own student choir. A beautiful beginning for this beautiful music.

This just in: There was ANOTHER standing ovation Sunday afternoon, in the cathedral of St. Louis. Next stop: Dordt College, IA on November 6.

The Boston Camerata’s overseas fall touring season began in October with two performances of Anne Azéma’s original program, “The Spark of the Soul,” based on the life and writings of the medieval German mystic, Meister Eckhardt.

Azéma and viellist/lutenist/reader Susanne Ansorg sang, spoke, and played their way through an original mini-anthology of thirteenth century works before audiences in Rosheim, Alsace, and Paris. The first concert took place in the medieval church of Rosheim and the
second in the spectacular, newly-restored Roman frigidarium at the Abbey/Museum of Cluny.

The Paris concert was the inaugural musical event in the world-famous, freshly renovated Cluny space.

In November, a larger Camerata cohort travels to Germany for a performance of the ensemble’s famed “Tristan and Iseult” production, presented under the auspices of the West German Radio. Anne Azéma will once again incarnate Iseult the Blonde, a role for which she shared the Grand Prix du Disque, with Aaron Engebreth, who first undertook the challenging part in 2008, cast in the role of Tristan.

This is going to be a busy, musical fall!

Anne Azéma and the Camerata begin the 2009 season with a series of medieval music presentations in France and in Germany.

Anne’s program around the life and thought of the German mystic Meister Eckhardt will be heard twice in France in October. “L’étincelle de l’âme”, with Camerata soloist Susanne Ansorg, will be performed in the bilingual border region of Alsace, where Eckhardt once lived, on October 3 (Rosheim, Festival Voix et Routes Romanes), and then October 7 in Paris (Musée National du Moyen Age, Thermes et Hotel de Cluny). Continue reading →