Convinced by a fantastic performance of the “Tagen Alter Musik”

“An evocative return in sound to the Middle Ages with the Boston Camerata… Twenty years ago the Boston Camerata caused a sensation with “Tristan and Isolde” as a medieval opera. That production’s inspiring Isolde is their new current director, Anne Azéma. The music is, to be sure, a montage of various sources from the 12th to 14th centuries. But thanks to first-class singers, who were sensitively accompanied by vielle, flute, cornetto, harp and rebec, there arose a sonic spell of love, from which no listener could escape.”

– Klaus Lipinski, Ruhr Nachrichten, November 16, 2009

“The ovation just went on and on. It seemed endless.” That’s a quote captured a few days ago, at Boston’s Logan airport, from the eyewitness account of a returning Camerata musician. She was describing the reaction of the audience in Germany, the previous day, at the end of Camerata’s “Tristan and Iseult” performance.

The November festival concert of Camerata’s now-legendary “Tristan” script was a commission from the German radio, the Westdeutsche Rundfunk, and the recent performance will be broadcast in Germany on December 7. Thanks to all who made it work so well, including new cast members Jean Lorrain (Gottfried, the Poet/Narrator) and Jennifer Ellis (Brangane). In our photo, you see Aaron Engebreth and Tristan, and Anne Azéma (who also directed) as Iseult.

In the days following “Tristan,” Anne and viellist Susanne Ansorg teamed up to teach three days of master classes at the Tilburg conservatory, Netherlands. The subject, closely related to the concert of only a few days before: German song of the Middle Ages. This is a very busy fall for Anne and her colleagues.

Following a successful French tour in early 2008, Camerata’s world-famous production of “Tristan & Iseult” returns to Germany on Friday, November 13, 16:00, as part of the Herne Festival. The fabulous texts of Gottfried von Strassburg will be read and sung in the original medieval German, and Anne Azéma participates both as Iseult the Blond and as the director of a stellar international cast. If you know our “Tristan” from the 1987 CD, you will be surprised by how much the production has evolved, and grown, in the intervening years. For more information, please click here.

For those of you who cannot attend the concert, it will be recorded for later broadcast. But come, if you can.

November was harvest month for Boston Camerata musicians. As they performed “A Symphony of Psalms” around the country, they harvested ovation after ovation. Audiences at every venue – in Michigan, Missouri, Iowa and Massachusetts – rose spontaneously to their feet at each concert’s end, to salute the superb interpretations of Renaissance and early Baroque psalmody.

Your intrepid reporter was present at the final event of the tour, last Sunday’s beautiful Cambridge performance, and noted that Harvard’s Memorial Church hosted a large and raptly attentive audience. (more…)

Our undercover agent in Grand Rapids, Michigan, informs us that the première performance of Camerata’s fall production, “A Symphony of Psalms,” was greeted with a standing ovation. The event took place at Calvin College, a distinguished institution whose roots in the Dutch Reformation, and therefore in psalmody, run deep. Anne Azéma and the Camerata crew, seventeen strong, were delighted with the warm welcome (it’s a return engagement for us at this school), and with the enthusiastic participation of Calvin’s own student choir. A beautiful beginning for this beautiful music.

This just in: There was ANOTHER standing ovation Sunday afternoon, in the cathedral of St. Louis. Next stop: Dordt College, IA on November 6.