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Press Releases
Pure Delight! The Boston Camerata announces its 2024–2025 concert season, celebrating seven decades
Something extraordinary is about to happen: The Boston Camerata, America’s leading early music ensemble, is about to celebrate a milestone anniversary.
Seven Decades of the Camerata | Watch the Season Trailer
For immediate release (Boston, MA) – It’s hard to believe that 70 years ago, at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, an intrepid woman named Narcissa Williamson launched The Camerata, a company now treasured far beyond America's shores. Music-lovers around the world have built our music into their lives, and three generations of young musicians have been inspired by our programs and recordings.
“Camerata is a unique institution. I feel very fortunate to be a part of it”, said Artistic Director Anne Aze´ma. "The music of this small, enterprising company travels around the globe, and I love the feeling of discovery and adventure that accompanies practically everything we do.”
This institution has a great deal to celebrate in this 70th anniversary season, with a lineup of performances that recall our roots, and highlight us in the here and now.
Commemorating our founding, we open the season at the Museum of Fine Arts with Lands of Pure Delight: 70 Seasons of Music Making with the Boston Camerata on October 6. The music in this program will range through seven centuries across the world, from Medieval France to the early Americas.
December brings, not one, but two holiday programs. Hodie Christus Natus Est, a retelling of the Nativity, tours New England in early December. Then, In Dulci Jubilo: A German Christmas, with its lush sounds from Renaissance music of the Germanic world, comes to Cambridge, MA on December 22.
For our fans of music theatre, join us in January for one of the Camerata’s emblematic works, Daniel: A Medieval Masterpiece Revisited. The themes of justice, and of truth spoken to power are front and center as the captive Daniel confronts the tyrannical Belshazzar!
We'll be there! American Spirituals Black and White 1800-1900 tours the West Coast January 25–February 3. The most recent in Boston Camerata’s long series of Early American musical productions, this program stands for the shared musical and spiritual experiences of America’s peoples.
And, shortly thereafter, we travel across the pond for a revival of Borrowed Light – a stark, powerful production based on Shaker songs, created in collaboration with the Tero Saarinen Company – in Finland and France. A reprise will follow in Germany and Austria in the summer of 2025.
Returning from abroad, we offer Trav'ling Home: American Spirituals 1770-1870 in Springfield and Boston, MA at the end of April. You will encounter early American songs from the Puritans of New England, the Amish and Mennonites of Pennsylvania, the newly-freed African-American religious communities, and the Shakers and their visionary monodies.
Presented by the Boston Early Music Fesitval, A Gallery of Kings: Uses and Abuses of Power ca. 1300 has its U.S. premiere on June 10. Commissioned by the Reims Festival for the 800th anniversary of its cathedral, these ancient songs of kingship and its snares resonate strongly down the centuries, into our own, turbulent time.
Please be on the alert, as well, for related events and activities as our season unfolds. One can find much of our media catalogue on Warner - Erato, Nonesuch, Harmonia Mundi, Music and Arts labels.
We look to the past, in all its rich diversity, to better understand the present, to inform the future, and to encourage human connection via the shared joy of great music. To 70!
About The Boston Camerata
The Boston Camerata occupies a unique place in the densely populated universe of European and American early music ensembles. Camerata’s distinguished rank stems partly from its longevity: founded in 1954, when the field of endeavor was in its infancy, as an adjunct to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts’ musical instruments collection, Camerata is now one of the longest-lived groups to be vigorously functioning up to the present day.
But length of service, by itself is not sufficient to account for Camerata’s preeminence, nor are its numerous distinctions including the American Critics’ Circle Award, grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, residencies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Tennessee, and the Grand Prix du Disque. The Boston Camerata has achieved its eminence in large part because of its willingness to approach, with consistent success, many kinds of historical repertoires from many centuries, from the early Middle Ages to the nineteenth century, and from many places and cultures, stretching from the Middle East to early New England, with numerous intermediate stops in Renaissance and Baroque Europe and Latin America.
Directed from 1969 to 2009 by Joel Cohen, and from 2009 to the present day by Anne Aze´ma, the Boston Camerata has continued to create, over more than a half-century of activity, a large number of concert and media productions. These typically combine scholarship, much of it original, with high performance standards maintained by a distinguished roster of outstanding vocal soloists and instrumentalists. Camerata’s productions regularly combine dramatic flair with a certain humane, overarching perspective on the role music has played in (wo)mankind’s search for meaning and fulfillment. Camerata’s signature approach, as embodied in its touring, pedagogy, and media projects, has won the ensemble many listeners and followers on five continents as the ensemble presents new projects all the while maintaining in active repertoire many of its historic achievements.
For artistic questions, please reach out to Artistic Director, Anne Aze´ma: director@bostoncamerata.org
For other questions, please reach out to Administrator, Victoria Bocchicchio: admin@bostoncamerata.org
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