Blue Heron has been acclaimed by The Boston
Globe as “one of the Boston music community’s
indispensables” and hailed by Alex Ross in The New
Yorker for its “expressive intensity.” The ensemble ranges
over a wide repertoire from plainchant to new music, with
particular specialities in fifteenth-century Franco-Flemish
polyphony and early sixteenth-century English sacred music and is
committed to vivid live performance informed by the study of
original source materials and historical performance practices.
Blue Heron’s catalogue of a dozen recording include five discs of
music from the Peterhouse Partbooks, copied in 1540 for
Canterbury Cathedral, much of which consisted of world premiere
recordings; the fifth disc won the prestigious 2018 Gramophone
Classical Music Award for Early Music, the first ever awarded to
a non-European ensemble in the four-decade history of the
Gramophone Awards.
Founded in 1999, Blue Heron presents a concert series in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, and has appeared at the Boston Early
Music Festival; in New York City at Music Before 1800, The
Cloisters (Metropolitan Museum of Art), and the 92nd Street Y; at
the Library of Congress, the National Gallery of Art, and
Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C.; at the Berkeley Early Music
Festival; at Yale University; in Chicago, Cleveland, Kansas City,
Milwaukee, Montreal, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Providence, St.
Louis, San Luis Obispo, Seattle, and Vancouver; and in Cambridge
and London, England. Upcoming engagements include a visit to the
University of California, Davis, and a debut at the Tage alter
Musik Regensburg. Blue Heron has been in residence at the Center
for Early Music Studies at Boston University and at Boston
College, and has enjoyed collaborations with A Far Cry, Dark
Horse Consort, Les Délices, Parthenia, Piffaro, and Ensemble Plus
Ultra.
Cipriano
de Rore:I madrigali a cinque voci
with Italian recitations by Viola Ardeni, lecturer in the
Department of French and Italian at UC Davis
Blue Heron brings to Davis mid-sixteenth-century Italian
madrigals for five voices by the Flemish composer
Cipriano de Rore, setting lyric poems by
Petrarch and others. The poems will be recited in Italian to
make audible the ways in which the music captures a wide range of
emotions about the pain and pleasures of love. Blue Heron’s
world premiere recording (in 2019) of De Rore’s 1542 madrigal
set was made possible in part by the research of Jessie Ann
Owens, UC Davis Distinguished Professor of Music Emeritus and
former dean of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies. The
collaborative project was awarded the American Musicological
Society’s Noah Greenberg Award.
De Rore arrived in Italy in the 1530s, working at first as a
freelance musician. His very first publication was the 1542
Madrigali a cinque voci, the book from which the
madrigals to be presented are taken. This landmark publication
launched his successful career as chapelmaster in Ferrara,
Venice and Parma, where he died in 1565 at only 49.
He was the first composer to organize a madrigal book in modal
order, moving from minor to major keys. The poetry itself is
also highly organized, consisting of a cycle of sixteen
sonnets. The ordering enables the music to express both the
large-scale narrative of the poetry as well as its many
affective moments. One of the important conclusions Owens has
drawn about De Rore’s work is that his innovations were
genre-defining for the madrigal as a whole: “These madrigals,
each one a world unto itself, when taken together, tell a story
about the pain of love. With this print De Rore established the
madrigal as a genre that celebrates the fusion of music and
poetry.”
Founded in autumn 2008 by internationally renowned soloists who
for many years have championed the interpretation and promotion
of contemporary music, Berlin PianoPercussion is
an ensemble characterized by the individual and complementary
personalities of its members. During the Festival of Centre
Acanthes 2008 in Metz, pianists Prodromos Symeonidis and Ya-ou
Xie gave a series of concerts with works for two pianists and two
percussionists under the direction of Sylvio Gualda, the
reception of which led them to launch a new piano-percussion
ensemble.
Eclipse Quartet is dedicated to the music of
twentieth-century and present-day composers, with a special
appreciation of women composers. The scope of their repertoire
spans works by John Cage, Morton Subotnick, and Roscoe Mitchell,
to Ruth Crawford, Kajia Saariajo, and Meredith Monk. Eclipse’s
residence at UC Davis may include performances, workshops,
lecture demonstrations, student composition readings,
masterclasses, and private lessons.
Sarah Thornblade and Sara Parkins, violins
Alma Lisa Fernandez, viola
Maggie Parkins, cello
Program to be announced.
Eclipse Quartet is dedicated to the music of
twentieth-century and present-day composers, with a special
appreciation of women composers. The scope of their repertoire
spans works by John Cage, Morton Subotnick, and Roscoe Mitchell,
to Ruth Crawford, Kajia Saariajo, and Meredith Monk.
In harmony with other venues on the UC Davis campus and across
the state of California, The Arts departments are committed to
providing as safe an experience as possible to our greater
community—and will do so until state or county guidelines are
lifted.
There are three ways for you to attend, regardless of whether or
not the event is ticketed.
