This has been a difficult time. For all of us. And our thoughts go out to those who suffered ill health, or loss during this pandemic. And yet, music manages to live on, giving us renewed strength. We are fortified by the transforming and healing powers of great art.  I want to thank you for your support of Camerata’s music and musicians. Under Anne Azéma’s leadership, we were able to keep our company going, and in fact to produce beautiful and unusual media events like Dido and Aeneas, An American Christmas and Songs to the Lute. All of this happened, thanks in large part to your generosity. 

Moreover, because you have enabled our company to remain healthy and creative, we can announce, with joy, a new 2021-22 calendar of extraordinary programs.  Here’s our plan:

• We’ll be There in November will see us returning to our beloved repertoire of early American spiritual songbooks, but this time with an enlarged perspective, as we include and honor the African-American contribution to this wonderful art form of ours.
• In December, Anne and her cohort of angelic high voices will once again transport us to the Middle Ages, including Christmas works that have been Camerata favorites for two generations, as well as some ‘new’ surprises. A Medieval Christmas — Let the bells ring!
• And in early 2022, we sing, play, and narrate the bittersweet tale of the great Guillaume de Machaut, and his adventure with Perônne, a gifted young poetess and dancer. Douce Dame Jolie will tug on your heartstrings, even as the magnificent, elderly musician ends his impossible dream with a paean to beauty, and to love.

It’s an extraordinary menu! But to make all this happen, of course, requires resources. Whether these production concepts become streaming media events or live performance, or some combination of the two — and that will depend on our public health situation in the coming months — they require substantial financing.  

Won’t you become, once again, a part of our collective effort?  Please help to make The Boston Camerata a continued and vigorous part of the arts community, here and around the globe. Every gift, small and large, is received with gratitude.

With thanks and many good wishes for happiness and health,

Joel Cohen
Music Director Emeritus

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We were at the ready during these past difficult months. And the Boston Camerata continues, present for the musical season to come! We look forward, with a new series of unusual programs, to musical discovery, and to the return of live performance as soon as conditions permit.

We’ll Be There, our season opener, continues our decades-long exploration of early American spirituals, this time with particular attention to African-Americans’ contribution to this vital aspect of our national heritage. A Medieval Christmas, our holiday offering, offers the angelic sounds of female voices singing beautiful works from the Middle Ages. And Douce Dame Jolie tells the poignant medieval tale of an aging poet and his passionate young admirer. It’s going to be a memorable season — will you be there with us?

Subscriptions and ticketing will open soon – stay tuned!

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Our 2020 streaming production of Dido and Aeneas will return from June 7-20, 2021! Produced under Anne Azéma’s direction in late 2020 under strict COVID mitigation protocols, our Dido stars Tahanee Aluwihare, Luke Scott, Camila Parias, and Jordan Weatherston Pitts, assisted by young professionals from Longy School of Music and backed by an all-star Baroque band. Its return is not to be missed!

Tickets for this event can be purchased with a $20 donation to the Camerata. As always, if you buy your ticket before the streaming period begins, you will receive the link via email on the first day of streaming. Please check your spam (and your Promotions folder, if you use that feature in Gmail) if you cannot find our email.

Our offering on this day of remembrance is not, strictly speaking, a Boston Camerata production, nor is it even an early music experience — but it should be heard. In the late 1990s, Music Director Emeritus Joel Cohen recorded Kurt Weill’s powerful 1936 score for an American antiwar play, Johnny Johnson, for Erato Records. From that extraordinary recording, we excerpt the “Song of the Guns” for male chorus. Its elegiac text is most appropriate for this holiday. And we send wishes for peace, everywhere on our troubled planet.

‘Soldiers, soldiers, Sleep softly now beneath the sky!’: you will hear Camerata soloists John Fleagle, Donald Wilkinson and Richard Lalli, with the Otaré Pit Band directed by Joel Cohen. 

In this excerpt from Camerata’s Sacred Bridge program, Boujemaa Razgui sings an excerpt, in Arabic, from the Moroccan Nouba Rast Dal. Then Joel Cohen intones a Hebrew language Piyyut. The music, dear brothers and sisters, is the same.

In this moment of tragic conflict, may the things that unite us prevail over division and cruelty!

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Can you believe tomorrow is May 1? We can’t. To celebrate the new month, here’s a May song from twelfth century Provence, but with a twist: In this performance, from Camerata’s trailblazing CD New Britain, it morphs into a Spanish-language Christmas carol from the American Southwest. Thus does musical energy, and the creative spirit, persist across the oceans, and the centuries. Forward into spring!

And stay tuned – next week we will have a special preview of Songs to the Lute, our upcoming online concert of French lute songs featuring lutenist Nigel North and our own Anne Azéma, which will be streaming from May 15 – 31.

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Translations:

Calenda Maia, R. de Vacqueyras, Provence, ca. 1200
Neither Calends of May, nor beech leaves, nor bird songs, nor gladiolas – there is nothing that rejoices me more, noble and gay dame, than the messenger coming to me and speaking of your beautiful body that gives me the renewed pleasure of love, and takes me back to you, true lady; let the jealous one tumble!

Cuando por el oriente, New Mexico, 1953
When dawn came up from the east, our lady went out walking. Oh, what joy, my soul; blessed be thou, Queen of Heaven! * “Come,” said saint (Joseph), “We beg you, friend, to take us in. Sir, please give shelter to this young girl who is pregnant.” * Pregnant and beautiful maiden, who has ever seen such beauty. Oh, friends, these are flowers, and I can feel that there will be no more idiots in this world. * They took refuge in a fortunate shelter, where they were surrounded by a bull and a mule. What a joy to see these happy animals — there are beasts that can teach a thing or two to humans. * When the kings entered, without a by-your-leave, they made a square for a dance. A little black one, an Italian, a student, and a Portugee jumped around from place to place.