The Boston Camerata makes its long awaited debut in Switzerland. Anne Azéma and her colleagues will open the Basel Early Music Festival with a newly commissioned program of songs from the Middle Ages, exploring the themes of sleep and dreams, including works by the visionary Hildegard of Bingen.
Songes et Mençonges: Dreams and Deceptions
The Boston Camerata
Anne Azéma, voice, hurdy gurdy, harp, direction
Shira Kammen, vielle, harp
Timothy Leigh Evans, Michael Barrett, John Taylor Ward, voice
Medieval dreams, and even madness and folly, are frequently evoked in medieval music and poetry. Listening, we enter, via the delirium and desires of love, or the intimations of social decay, into a kind of dark transcendance. But these apparitions may also point upwards, serving as prelude to some heroic action, via the nighttime visions of kings and heroes. And they may also lead to a higher spiritual plane, via exalting, mystical epiphanies.
Anne Azéma, understands how to give to her songs the tragic intensity and dramatic power that are too often missing from academic recreations of medieval music.- Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
Magic sensuality. It may well alter the way we look at the Middle Ages.
– The Boston Globe
