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.
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.
