Joel Cohen, Music Director
Emeritus of the Boston Camerata, is a leading authority in the field of
medieval, Renaissance, and early American musical performance. He has received
widespread acclaim as performer, conductor, and writer/commentator in his chosen
field, and his unique style of program building has made the Camerata ensemble
famous on five continents.
Mr. Cohen studied composition at Harvard University. Awarded a Danforth
Fellowship, he spent the next two years in Paris as a student of Nadia
Boulanger. He has taught and lectured at many East Coast universities, including
Harvard, Yale, Brandeis, and Amherst. Abroad, he has given seminars and
workshops at the Schola Cantorum in Basel, at the Royal Opera of Brussels, in
Spain, Singapore, and Japan. During the fall semester of 2007 he was
Distinguished Artist in Residence at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
His professional honors include membership in Phi Beta Kappa, the Erwin
Bodky Award in early music, the Signet Society medal from Harvard, the Georges
Longy Achievement Award and the Howard Mayer Brown Award for lifetime
achievement in early music. He is an Officer of the Ordre des Arts et des
Lettres of the French Republic.
As lutenist, Mr. Cohen has appeared with numerous European ensembles. He was a
frequent accompanist to tenor Hugues Cuénod. More recently, his duo recitals
with soprano Anne Azéma
have taken him to many parts of Europe, Africa, and Asia. His conducting
appearances include two seasons at the Brussels opera, as well as invitations to
the Aix-en-Provence Festival (1989) and the Tanglewood Festival (1992, 1994,
1995). He was Artist in Residence in the Netherlands in 2000, the first American
musician to receive such an appointment.
Mr. Cohen's chosen repertoires span many centuries and countries, and over
thirty LP-CD programs have been recorded under his direction, for Nonesuch,
Telefunken, Harmonia Mundi, Erato, and other labels. Over the years he has taken
a special interest in French music of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and early
Baroque. In 1989, his recording of Tristan et Iseult
, based on original medieval sources, won
the Grand Prix du Disque of the Académie Charles Cros, Paris. In early 1993, his
recording of the Requiem by seventeenth-century Provençal composer Jean
Gilles, realised at the Aix-en-Provence festival, was enthusiastically received
by the French press and public.
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