The Boston Camerata, Anne Azéma, artistic director
Delving deep into the early music repertory, the esteemed Boston Camerata – celebrating its 60th season – enlivens an important chapter of cultural history: the competing centers of France and Italy in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance. Boston Camerata will work in collaboration with MIT musicologist and programmer Michael Cuthbert, whose open-source software music21 allows scholars to find patterns and “fill in the gaps” among pieces of music from vast data sets. Their performance at MIT will include the first performances in over six hundred years of newly reconstructed works.
Of All the Flowers: Song of the Middle Ages
In this specially commissioned program for MIT, you will hear music spanning the worlds of God and Man, by the greatest composers of their day: Machaut, Landini, da Bologna, and others.
The constantly evolving and inventive musical minds of Italian and French masters during the fourteenth century has left us with repertoires, both sacred and secular, that successfully unite the search for new and different creative paths with astonishing lyricism and sensual beauty. In this specially commissioned program for MIT, you will hear music spanning the worlds of God and Man, by the greatest composers of their day: Machaut, Landini, da Bologna, and others, performed by Camerata’s virtuoso soloists and instrumentalists.
Learn more about Boston Camerata
March 6, 2015 / 8:00 pm
MIT Walker Memorial Building, 50
142 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA
Admission: $20, students, seniors and alumni: $10, MIT Students/Faculty/Staff: Free.
Portes du Ciel
February 28, 2015 / 8:00 pm
MIT Chapel, W15
48 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA
Free Admission
SOLD OUT
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, both secular and sacred from the regions of Champagne, Picardy, and Lorraine. The compositions, by turns refined and aristocratic, and simple as folksong, all celebrate and praise the Virgin Mary. Noble melodies in the refined trouvère style, narrations in word and song, and rollicking dance music with sacred texts, comprise this production. Featured composers are the prior of Vic-sur-Aisne, Gauthier de Coincy (1177/8-1236), a passionate and prolix musician-poet, who recounts the miracles of the Virgin that took place in his parish; Thibault de Champagne (1201-1253), count of Champagne and king of Navarra, who praises the Queen of Heaven in the most elegant and subtle style; and a fraternity of anonymous minstrels who transform wordly songs of the day into vigorous, toe-tapping spirituals.
