Christmas in Medieval England allows listeners to share the beauty, excitement, intensity and variety found in a Blue Heron concert performance. It includes plainchant, carols, and other music for Advent and Christmas from 15th c. England. It is comprised entirely of tracks recorded live at First Church in Cambridge, Congregational in December 2013. The disc should find favor with fans of Blue Heron’s first CD release (BHCD1001), which contained music of 15th c. France. “… one of the Boston music community’s indispensables.” (Boston Globe)

"This debut marks Blue Heron as a leading new actor in the field of early Renaissance music, both for studying the sources and bringing them to life. Altogether, this is one of the finest Dufay collections to come out in recent years."

- Fanfare

Music by Guillaume Du Fay (1397-1474)
Blue Heron’s first CD offers an entrancing selection of music by one of the greatest composers of the 15th century. The program includes three isorhythmic motets (Apostolo glorioso, Rite majorem Jacobum canamus, and Ecclesie militantis), the glorious, large-scale Sanctus “Papale” in its first recording in three decades, two hymns with alternatim plainchant verses, and a generous sampling of secular songs. While the disc is mostly devoted to the music of Du Fay, it also includes a song by Du Fay’s contemporary Hugo de Lantins (Mon doulx espoir), and a marvelous motet-chanson by his friend and colleague of the next generation, Johannes Ockeghem (Permanent vierge). The music was recorded in September 2006 at the Church of the Redeemer in Chestnut Hill, MA and the CD was released in March 2007 on the Blue Heron label as BHCD 1001.

At their most fanatical, the radicalized Reformists of England’s Church sought to purify the Church of everything worldly—and for our purposes, that included music set to Latin texts or requiring professional performance. It didn’t need a mass uprising to achieve this cleansing, this destruction. Merely a few small gangs of determined individuals in a time and place when the rule of law was in abeyance was probably sufficient, though the appointment of several influential Puritans to high office certainly didn’t help matters. Much music is known to have been lost, though a justified level of fear encouraged forethought in a few instances. It wasn’t until 1926 that a servant at Peterhouse revealed a hidden cupboard behind the Perne library’s paneling, for instance, where three Caroline partbooks were hidden.

Still, some of the partbooks have gone missing over time; and given that a set, one voice to a part, is required for performance, any loss has proven sufficient to silence so much fine Tudor polyphony. The Henrician Peterhouse group—Peterhouse MSS 40, 41, 31 and 32, a total of 72 works, 39 of which are unica—furnish a sad example of this. Of its five partbooks, the tenor is missing, as well as several leaves removed at some point from the treble. Various scholars long asserted that the kind of florid style frequently found in these books was no longer being composed in the later years of Henry’s rule, and paid no attention to the partbooks because they were little known and their contents unperformable. It is thanks to musicologist Nick Sandon, who has supplied the tenor part (and when necessary, the treble), that we have a working edition of those compositions that can’t be found elsewhere.

This fourth volume of the series once again features a work by Nicholas Ludford (c. 1490–1557). He is easily the best-known composer on the disc, which, given that he was almost entirely unknown until the last half century, says much about England’s musical discontinuity. (As well as the importance of Peterhouse’s Henrician partbooks; for a fair amount of what they include isn’t unica by well-known composers, but by those who lived, worked, died, and were completely forgotten.) Though his Ave cujus conceptio is not the centerpiece of the album as the Missa Regnum mundi (Blue Heron 1003) and Missa Inclina cor meum (Blue Heron 1004) were of theirs, it is a brightly buoyant work without shadows, launching lengthy melismatic phrases like so many streamers.

The central work on the program is the Missa Spes nostra of Robert Jones (fl. 1520–1535). His is a cantus firmus Mass, and as was the custom in England at the time, there is no pre-composed, polyphonic Kyrie. (Blue Heron supplies a plainchant one from the Sarum use sung, as was this Mass, on Trinity Sunday.) Metcalfe points out in his excellent liner notes that Jones “plays with the idea of alternation between major and minor harmonizations of the third scale degree” throughout the Mass. This, along with some simpler homophonic statements among the wealth of imitation, gives it at times an almost folk-like quality, though upon other occasions Jones relishes the passing dissonances his juxtapositions invite. Sandon notes in his doctoral dissertation that Jones can be unpredictable, and that he “sometimes writes very neat motivically generated counterpoint, but at other times he can be quirky and wayward.” This Mass is a highly individualized work, and amply repays repeated listening.

The final composer on the program, Robert Hunt, is so obscure that he hasn’t even been further identified yet. Only two pieces of his survive, both in the Peterhouse partbooks: an Ave Maria mater dei, and the Stabat mater dolorosa heard here. It is the only work on the disc missing both its tenor and treble parts, which Sandon has supplied. In a manner that recalls the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, it invites the listener to partake in the successive emotions experienced at the foot of the Cross by Mary, and manages this brilliantly in a very free, intensely emotive fashion. It should be required listening of anyone who feels that imitative counterpoint can’t be expressive.

It is also a superb example of what Scott Metcalfe has achieved with Blue Heron: an ensemble that yields to none for intonation, blend, and clarity, yet also utilizes both overall and part-related dynamics as an expressive device in a way most other professional choirs of its quality do not. Metcalfe is alive to the lyricism that was a remarked-upon feature of 15th-century English music, and the beauty of Blue Heron’s phrasing displays this everywhere on this disc. That the choir isn’t better known is no doubt a result in part of its rarified repertoire, but also Metcalfe’s desire to retain control over all aspects of his recordings. So you won’t find Blue Heron on such labels as Hyperion or Harmonia Mundi, but you will find that the excellent engineering on this album provides a close, rich sound with just enough reverberation to give body to the voices.

Complete texts and translations are included. Really, the entire series to date is worth the purchase. And if you want to sample some of Blue Heron’s recordings, as well as buy them, the place to go is blueheronchoir.org. Strongly recommended.

Copied in 1540 for Canterbury Cathedral, which had just been refounded as a secular cathedral following Henry VIII's dissolution of the monastic cathedrals, the Peterhouse partbooks contain seventy-two works for five voices in the major liturgical forms of the day-principally Mass, Magnificat, and votive antiphon. Despite the enormous importance of this source to music history and the extremely high quality of much of the music contained in it, it has received short shrift from performers and musicologists alike, owing to the fact that the tenor partbook, along with a portion of the treble, has been missing for centuries. This has prevented singers from performing the fifty pieces in the partbooks that survive complete in no other source-until recently, that is. Blue Heron's performances of the incomplete Peterhouse music rely on reconstructions by the English musicologist Nick Sandon, who over the course of his career has devoted much of his creative energies to the project. Sandon completed his dissertation on the partbooks in 1983, including reconstructions of almost all of the incomplete music. Over the nearly three decades since, he has been refining and revising his completions and issuing them in Antico Edition.

Blue Heron has made the Peterhouse repertoire a specialty ever since its first concerts in 1999, in which the ensemble performed Aston's Ave Maria dive matris Anne, the opening track of the new disc. It is safe to say that Blue Heron has sung more of Nick Sandon's tenor lines than any other ensemble in North America, and never in ten years has any one in the group felt that a note he composed felt wrong. His quite amazing accomplishment is to have recreated a musical line that is utterly idiomatic, not merely to the general language of English music in the early sixteenth century, but to the local dialect and accent of one composer and, even more specifically, to that one composer's voice as heard in one piece in all its particularity. We-and Aston and Jones and Mason and all the other Peterhouse composers-owe him grateful thanks for restoring this marvelous music to us in singable form.

The CD booklet includes extensive notes by Nick Sandon on the Peterhouse partbooks, their place in history, and the process of restoring the missing music, as well detailed information concerning historical performance practice by Scott Metcalfe.

The second installment in Blue Heron’s 5-CD series of Music from the Peterhouse Partbooks features Nicholas Ludford’s radiant Missa Regnum mundi, sung in a musical context like that of its probable original occasion, a festal mass for St Margaret, with plainchant items from the Proper according to the Use of Salisbury. The disc concludes with Richard Pygott’s extraordinary Salve regina, one of the longest votive antiphons extant and a marvel of rhetorical expression.

The first release of new material from Blue Heron since winning the 2018 Gramophone Classical Music Award for Early Music, this two-album set is the world-premiere recording of Cipriano de Rore’s landmark first book of madrigals for five voices. The set includes all twenty madrigals in De Rore’s 1542 print, as well as readings of the Italian poems (many of which are by Petrarch) by Alessandro Quarta. De Rore is celebrated as an innovator who helped create the madrigal as it is known today, putting the music at the service of the text and inventing a new, dramatic, and expressive harmonic language. In this music, listeners will perceive a deep engagement with the text, an engagement matched by the singers of Blue Heron, who were led by both Scott Metcalfe and Alessandro Quarta in developing an appropriately rhetorical style of performance. Musicologist Jessie Ann Owens has shown that the book is a poetic and musical cycle that likely resulted from a collaboration between De Rore and the Venetian poet Giovanni Brevio, who wrote the opening and closing poems of the set. The narrative structure is illustrated with “the colors of the modal system,” the madrigals being sequenced in modal order. Professor Owens’ research and conclusions are presented in extensive notes in the booklet. Prof. Owens and Blue Heron won the 2015 Noah Greenberg Award from the American Musicological Society, which provided stimulus funding for the project.

A New York Times 25 Best Classical Track Selection for 2019

One year after winning the 2018 Gramophone Classical Music Award for Early Music for the fifth album in its series Music from the Peterhouse Partbooks, and just one month after releasing the world premiere recording of Cipriano de Rore’s I madrigali a cinque voci, Blue Heron announces the release of the first in a new series of recordings dedicated to the music of Johannes Ockeghem and his contemporaries. Johannes Ockeghem: Complete Songs, vol. 1 is the first of two releases which will present all of Ockeghem’s songs in a complete set; the second is planned for release in 2022. The songs have not been recorded complete since the early 1980s. Johannes Ockeghem (c. 1420-1497) was one of the most celebrated musicians of the fifteenth century and is one of the greatest composers of all time, every bit the equal of J.S. Bach in contrapuntal technique and profound expressivity, and like Bach able to combine the most rigorous intellectual structure with a beguiling sensuality. His two dozen songs set French lyric poetry in the courtly forms of the fifteenth century—rondeau, virelai, and ballade—to exquisitely crafted polyphony in which all voices are granted equally beautiful and compelling melodies. Besides eleven of Ockeghem’s songs, the disc includes two related works: the anonymous En atendant vostre venue from the recently-discovered Leuven Chansonnier (probably copied c. 1475 in the Loire Valley, where Ockeghem lived and worked), whose text borrows the first line of Ockeghem’s Quant de vous seul, and Au travail suis by the composer Barbingant, which quotes both text and music from the opening of Ockeghem’s Ma maistresse. The booklet contains complete texts and translations and notes on the music and performance practice by Sean Gallagher and Blue Heron’s music director Scott Metcalfe.

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REVIEW:

Though these works for multiple singers are thick with contrapuntal lines, and have a tinge of austere Renaissance sacred music, they are also gorgeous, sensual and nuanced, as Blue Heron’s splendid account of “Permanent vierge” demonstrates.

– New York Times (Anthony Tommasini)

Winner of the 2018 Gramophone Classical Music Award for Early Music, Volume 5 of Music from the Peterhouse Partbooks contains the world premiere recording of a Mass by an anonymous English composer from the first half of the 16th century. Since the source of the cantus firmus has not been identified, the Mass remains without a name (""sine nomine""). The release also includes an antiphon addressed to St. Augustine of Canterbury which is the only surviving work of Hugh Sturmy, a short and dramatic Ave Maria mater dei by Robert Hunt, whose Stabat mater is a highlight of vol. 3 of the series, and the sonorous and captivating Ve nobis miseris by John Mason, for men's voices in five parts. This recording is part of a 5-release project which began in 2010.

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Excerpts of reviews from previously released volumes included in this set:

Music from the Peterhouse Partbooks, Vol. 5


2018 Gramophone Magazine Early Music Award Winner

The anonymously-composed Mass in particular is superb. Whoever wrote it almost certainly knew Taverner's Gloria tibi Trinitas, for echoes of it abound, yet it is no slavish imitation. For this piece alone the disc is worth owning. This is one of the discoveries of the year.

– Gramophone

Jones: Missa Spes Nostra - Ludford: Ave Cujus Conceptio - Hunt: Stabat Mater

Robert Jones's Missa Spes nostra, the album's centerpiece, has an almost folk-like quality, though upon other occasions Jones relishes the passing dissonances his juxtapositions invite. It is a highly individualized work, and amply repays repeated listening.

– Fanfare

Ludford: Missa Regnum Mundi; Pygott: Salve Regina

They blend beautifully, but the emphasis isn’t on a homogenous sound; instead, it’s on one that allows each voice part to be heard in its distinct contribution and with a fitting weight, given the shifting balance of musical thought. The texts are enunciated with great clarity, and a degree of emphasis that very subtly seconds moments of intensity.

– Fanfare

2018 Gramophone Magazine Early Music Award Winner

Volume 5 of Music from the Peterhouse Partbooks contains the world premiere recording of a Mass by an anonymous English composer from the first half of the 16th century. Since the source of the cantus firmus has not been identified, the Mass remains without a name ("sine nomine"). The release also includes an antiphon addressed to St. Augustine of Canterbury which is the only surviving work of Hugh Sturmy, a short and dramatic Ave Maria mater dei by Robert Hunt, whose Stabat mater is a highlight of vol. 3 of the series, and the sonorous and captivating Ve nobis miseris by John Mason, for men's voices in five parts. This recording is part of a 5-release project which began in 2010.

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REVIEW:

The anonymously-composed Mass in particular is superb. Whoever wrote it almost certainly knew Taverner's Gloria tibi Trinitas, for echoes of it abound, yet it is no slavish imitation. For this piece alone the disc is worth owning. This is one of the discoveries of the year.

– Gramophone

MASON Ave fuit prima salus. ANON Cunctipotens genitor. LUDFORD Missa Inclina cor meum • Scott Metcalfe, cond; Blue Heron • BLUE HERON 1004 (59:58 Text and Translation)


Philip Heseltine (better known his compositional pseudonym of Peter Warlock) once lamented that all the music of England’s Golden Age that still existed had been found, and that there was no more to uncover, or transcribe. But this was towards the end of his short life, while in deep depression. In the more than 80 years that have passed since that time, much additional music has been brought to light. Some of it, too, that was previously damaged to the point where performance was thought impossible, has been painstakingly reconstructed.


This is the case with a subset of the Peterhouse partbooks compiled in a relatively short time, probably in the early 1540s, following Henry VIII’s famous Dissolution of the Monasteries. The king’s death in 1547 led to a series of rulers and policies that set the nation careening across the religious spectrum, with various levels of tolerance towards such delights as sacred choral music. At some point, whether through neglect or deliberate sabotage, the tenor book vanished, and was never recovered. Portions of the treble book also went missing. What made this particular loss severe is that of the 72 pieces included in the Henrician group of partbooks, 39 are unica , while another 12 exist elsewhere only in incomplete versions.


The reconstruction of individual pieces has become the lifework of musicologist Nick Sandon. It’s his editions we hear on this album, with a new version of the missing tenor part in the Mass, and both treble and tenor in the antiphon. These are world premieres of both works in two respects, then—not only first recordings, but also part of a series of first performances since the mid-17th century, at the latest.


John Mason is by far the least-known of the composers on this release, and the only reason we know his music at all is because of four works in these partbooks. The Ave fuit prima salus isn’t based on a cantus firmus . Its interest lies in the brilliant yet subtle variations the composer works on each of his 17 verses that conclude with “Ave Maria.” Mason is a past master at varying textures through the number and color of active parts, but the emphasis tends for the most part towards the contemplative side of the emotional scale, as is appropriate. Sandon is quoted in the liner notes as finding the text “as undistinguished as literature as it is pedestrian in theology,” but it is all turned to gold by the composer.


The Missa Inclina cor meum is the second of two by Ludford that come down to us solely from the Peterhouse partbooks. (The other, Missa Regnum mundi , was recorded on Blue Heron 1003, and reviewed in Fanfare 36:1.) As its cantus firmus is not associated with any specific feast day, Metcalfe has chosen not to include plainchant Propers. The custom of the day in England was to omit writing a through-composed Kyrie, and replace it with a plainsong-based textual trope—which is exactly what we get here with Cunctipotens genitor , instead of leaving a mass minus a movement as many recordings do: well done. Metcalfe points in particular to a passage in the Sanctus where the basses greatly augment the melody as the top voices “spin out melodies high above” as an example of “truly strange passages,” but in its entirety this mass is a boldly imaginative work of great melodic beauty and harmonic sensitivity.


What continues to set apart these recordings of Blue Heron from the majority of choirs recording similar repertoire is the use of expressive devices. To beauty of phrasing, and the careful blending of parts, Scott Metcalfe adds clarity of enunciation, flexible tempos, and both a general and part-related control of dynamics that never approaches stylistic anachronism. As a result, the music doesn’t float in a vacuum, but becomes the carrier when appropriate for an emotional current. When it is sung that with Mary “angels rejoice and archangels exult,” for example, the performance reasonably seconds the music, and the score blazes with the brightness of that eternal moment. There are many more instances of that, all to the good.


The sound is close and resonant, but absolutely clear, with none of the messy lack of focus that comes from cloudy, over-reverberant efforts. The quality of this series remains as high as ever, both for music and performance. Available from blueheronchoir.org and, needless to add, strongly recommended.


FANFARE: Barry Brenesal

The vocal ensemble Blue Heron, winner of the 2018 Gramophone Classical Music Award for Early Music and a 2020 Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik, presents A 14th-Century Salmagundi. A salmagundi is a savory dish composed of chopped meats, seafoods, eggs, vegetables, and condiments; a mixture or hodgepodge; an assemblage of miscellaneous components. Blue Herons Salmagundi is a pleasing miscellany of music composed c. 1300-1400, a delightful salad of ingredients gathered from our storehouse of French and Italian songs, including virtuosic music by Guillaume de Machaut, Francesco Landini, and Jacob Senleches. Seven vocal soloists are featured along with medieval fiddle, harp, and lute.

The fruit of a unique collaboration between a brilliant musical polymath and one of the world's leading vocal ensembles specializing primarily in medieval and Renaissance polyphony-the composer Mehmet Ali Sanlikol and Blue Heron-Lessons from Nightingales presents the world premiere recordings of two new pieces inspired by the two principal Turkish traditions of Sufi mysticism. The Triumph (composed in 2024 for Blue Heron's twenty-fifth birthday) sets a poem by the Bektasi Sufi dervish Edip Harabi (1853-1917) in a dazzling sound world created by an ensemble of voices, bowed tanbur (long-necked lute), ney (end-blown flute), and an array of percussion, weaving together elements of Turkish songs, modes, and rhythmic cycles; Renaissance counterpoint; and the Japanese court music called Gagaku. Devran (composed in 2017) honors pluralism within Islam by setting texts by Mevlevi Sufi dervishes in a two-movement a cappella piece like a motet-a staple of Renaissance European Christian music-in which the imitative style of sixteenth-century counterpoint is the main influence, while Middle Eastern makam (mode) tradition and elements of Turkish Sufi music contribute substantially to the musical effect. A distinctly jazz-influenced harmonic palette lends it's glamorous color to both pieces. Blue Heron applies it's signature intensity, expressivity, and mastery of polyphony to Sanlikol's bewitching twenty-first century polyphony, joined in The Triumph by the virtuoso instrumentalists of Sanlikol's ensemble DuNYA.

A celebration of the Christmas season, from Advent through the New Year, in music from the courts of 15th-century France and Burgundy. Music by Guillaume Du Fay, Johannes Regis, Jacob Obrecht, Josquin Desprez, Antoine Brumel, Adrian Willaert, and others.

A New Yorker Notable Recording of 2022!

A feast of poetry, song, and visual art animated by a surprisingly Zen-like philosophy, Guillaume de Machaut’s Remede de Fortune tells the tale of a woebegone lover who is counseled by Lady Hope on how to be happy and persevere in the face of the ups and downs dished out by Fortune and her Wheel.

Machaut was at once the greatest poet and composer of 14th-century Europe, and the Remede is a narrative poem or dit, around 4000 lines long, with interpolated lyrics set to music. This live recording of a concert production of the Remede—a collaboration between two outstanding American ensembles, Blue Heron and Les Délices—includes all seven musical items from the Remede as well as a selection of other motets, songs, and dances, which take the place of the narration, express the emotions and thoughts of the Lover, and convey Hope’s teachings in lyric form.

Four singers are joined by a delightful ensemble of medieval instruments (recorder, douçaine, fiddle, lute, harp, hurdy-gurdy, and percussion) in performances which are both spirited and deeply informed by the study of historical performance practices. The album booklet contains complete texts and translations, an interspersed synopsis of the story, and numerous full-color reproductions of the pictures that grace the lavishly illustrated first manuscript copy of the Remede, prepared c. 1350 under Machaut’s supervision.

REVIEW:

What is “Remede de Fortune?” Nothing less than a multi-media work of art – created in 1350. Guillaume de Machaut was one of the greatest poets of his time. And one of the greatest composers. But Remede is more than just a combination of Machaut’s words and music. Machaut personally supervised the creation of an illuminated book.

The early music vocal group Blue Heron staged a live performance of “Remede” with Les Délices. Their performance includes all the music contained in the story. The narration was replaced with motets, songs, and dances of the period. It’s a great performance and one that can be enjoyed on several levels. I first listened to the recording cold. The recording works as a pure listening experience. There’s enough variety between the combination of instruments and voices to hold interest.

Blue Heron is still one of the finest vocal ensembles around, and they didn’t disappoint. The music was sung with pure, clear tones of incredible expressive beauty. Les Délices provided subtle accompaniment, supporting the vocalists without detracting from them. The release comes with the complete text for Remede (and thankfully English translation). It also includes several full-color reproductions of the artwork. So one could, as in Machaut’s time, follow along with the text and art as the music played.

It was an extraordinary work of art, and it’s an extraordinary realization. Highly recommended.

-- WTJU 91.1 FM

Johannes Ockeghem (c. 1420-1497) was one of the most celebrated musicians of the fifteenth century and one of the greatest composers of all time. He was every bit the equal of J.S. Bach in contrapuntal technique and profound expressivity, and like Bach able to combine the most rigorous intellectual structure with a beguiling sensuality. His two dozen songs set French lyric poetry in the courtly forms of his era—rondeau, virelai, and ballade—to exquisitely crafted polyphony in which all voices are granted equally beautiful and compelling melodies.

This CD is the companion to Blue Heron’s 2019 release, Johannes Ockeghem: Complete Songs, Volume 1, which was named to the Bestenliste of the Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik and acclaimed in Gramophone as “performances of absolute clarity, beautifully in tune, beautifully balanced and beautifully recorded”; Early Music enthused that “the Boston-based ensemble is at its finest—a summit quite sublime.… The group’s extraordinary rapport with the music is evident everywhere in the recording; each melodic line is not only clear and precise but also imbued with obvious affection.”

Besides twelve of Ockeghem’s songs, the disc includes two related works (Gilles Binchois’s Pour prison, quoted by Ockeghem in his song La despourveue, and Johannes Cornago’s Qu’es mi vida, arranged by Ockeghem) and an anonymous instrumental arrangement of Ockeghem’s Je n’ay dueil. The CD booklet contains complete texts and translations, and notes by music historian Sean Gallagher and Blue Heron’s artistic director, Scott Metcalfe.