From concert to record: Guillaume de Machaut’s “Remede de Fortune”
Paolo Scarnecchia, Radiotelevisione svizzera | March 14, 2023
“La registrazione di quel concerto è divenuta un disco nel quale grazie alla qualità degli interpreti e al calore della esecuzione dal vivo si coglie tutta la grazia, la delicatezza e l’eleganza della poetica di Machaut.”
This concert recording is a disc in which, thanks to the quality of the performers and the warmth of the live performance, all the grace, delicacy, and elegance of Machaut’s poetics are captured.
Guillaume de Machaut: Remede de fortune
Gary Higginson, MusicWeb International | January 19, 2023
“…one of the most beautifully and lavishly made discs that has ever come my way.”
Fortune Favors the Old: Machaut from Blue Heron and Les Délices
Jacob Jahiel, Early Music America | November 21, 2022
“captivating … both musically compelling and narratively cohesive … While it is skill rather than fortune that has resulted in this rendition of Remede de Fortune, it is nonetheless a stroke of luck to receive an album so well-crafted and expertly performed.”
Machaut Remede de Fortune New Triumph for Blue Heron
WTJU 91.1FM University of Virginia Radio | November 3, 2022
“It’s a great performance and one that can be enjoyed on several levels… 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… [The Remede] was an extraordinary work of art, and it’s an extraordinary realization. Highly recommended.”
La poesia allo stato puro di Machaut [Machaut’s Pure Poetry]
Paolo Scarnecchia, Il giornale della musica | October 29, 2022
“To understand the beauty of Guillaume de Machaut’s masterpiece Remede de Fortune, one must listen to this disc … ”
Early Music Review: A 14th-Century Salmagundi
D. James Ross, Early Music Review | July 6, 2022
Blue Heron prove superbly in tune with this 14th-century music … entirely enjoyable … the voices of Blue Heron sounding so natural one-to-a-part and with instruments, including a fine idiomatic contribution on bray harp by the group’s director, Scott Metcalfe.
Early Music: An embarrassment of polyphonic riches
Sigrid Harris, Early Music | August 2021, pp. 460-63
Blue Heron’s Johannes Ockeghem: Complete songs volume 1, is particularly precious…. Thanks to the gloriousness of the polyphony and the astounding purity of the ensemble’s voices, the whole album is a spiritual experience.
Early Music: An embarrassment of polyphonic riches
Sigrid Harris, Early Music | August 2021, pp. 460-63
… I madrigali is easily one of the most important additions to the early music discography in the last quarter-century.…
Musicweb-International: A 14th-Century Salmagundi
Gary Higginson, MusicWeb International | July, 2021
This performance by Owen McIntosh is perhaps the most elegant and fluid I have ever heard.… His performance of Machaut’s Biauté qui toutes autres pere … is beautifully lyrical … well focused, intimate, yet spacious …
Limelight: A 14th-Century Salmagundi
Alexandra Coghlan, Limelight Magazine, Australia | August 10, 2021
A delicious medley that leaves you hungry for more.
Early Music America: Blue Heron Soars On Two Recordings
Karen Cook, Early Music America | June 15, 2020
… this is now the Ockeghem to beat …
Having these two ambitious projects come to fruition in the same year is a feast for doting fans and newcomers alike. Both are landmark recordings — again, the de Rore is a world premiere, and there hasn’t been a recording of all of Ockeghem’s secular songs since the early 1980s. They both are also masterfully, sensitively done, and most highly recommended.
Gramophone: “absolute clarity, beautifully in tune, beautifully balanced and beautifully recorded”
David Fallows, Gramophone | January 2020
The signal virtue of Blue Heron’s Ockeghem is that they give the music room to breathe: this has always been rare in performances of 15th-century song and it pays instant dividends. Innumerable unfamiliar details come out of these performances … these are performances of absolute clarity, beautifully in tune, beautifully balanced and beautifully recorded.… A major new step in the enjoyment of 15th-century song.
Early Music Review: “The performances are superb”
Richard Turbet, Early Music Review | February 21, 2020
The performances are superb, serving this music with the perfect balance of restraint and commitment.… Blue Heron live up to their reputation as among the finest interpreters of early music on the planet.
Music Web International: “deeply expressive … a first-class recording”
Gary Higginson, MusicWeb International | February 2020
… deeply expressive … Ockeghem’s harmonies are astonishingly rich and, at times, I think, daring. Blue Heron bring out these qualities in a way which constantly holds one’s attention. His melodies are often wide-ranging and can include subtle imitation and often canon. BH capture the so-called ‘noble simplicity’ of Ockeghem, or, as David Fallows has admitted, a certain ‘inscrutability’ … It is all quite brilliantly done and completed by a first-class recording.
Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik: Bestenliste
(German Record Critics’ Award, Quarterly Critics’ Choice)
Carsten Niemann, Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik | January 2020
With this recording, part of an ambitiously planned Ockeghem project, the Boston-based vocal ensemble Blue Heron shines a new light on one of the most influential composers of the fifteenth century. In contrast to Ockeghem’s sacred music, his secular songs are restricted to three voices, with colors occasionally enriched by the subtle use of harp or fiddle. Calmly yet sensuously performed, at once flexibly and transparently shaped, these neglected chansons take on a hitherto unsuspected radiance that touches heart and mind alike. (Translation from German by Scott Metcalfe)
Fanfare: Five stars for Ockeghem Songs, vol. 1
J. F. Weber, Fanfare | May/June 2020
This is an outstanding effort that would grace the catalog of any record label.… Five stars: A marvelous collection of 15th-century songs in excellent performances.
Early Music Review: “they deliver in spades”
Richard Turbet, Early Music Review
It was therefore with a great sense of anticipation that [Blue Heron’s] next major project, Cipriano de Rore’s complete book of madrigals in five parts, 1542, has been awaited. Unsurprisingly they deliver in spades, both in performance and in presentation … Thanks to the versatility and sensitivity of Blue Heron’s singers … every work receives detailed individual attention.
American Record Guide: “Splendid in every way”
Catherine Moore, American Record Guide (Vol. 83, Issue 1) | January/February 2020
Splendid in every way, this first recording of Cipriano de Rore’s first publication, Madrigali a Cinque Voci of 1542, is revelatory. In 2015 the Blue Heron ensemble and UC Davis scholar Jessie Ann Owens were jointly given the Noah Greenberg Award from the American Musicological Society. It supported the collaboration that led to this recording. The result is a model of how performers, scholars, and record labels work together to bring unknown music to life.… This music could have no greater champions.
University of Virginia- WTJU Radio: Ockeghem Songs Blue Heron’s latest and greatest
Ralph Graves, WTJU Radio| Nov 27, 2019
There are two things I can count on: blue-chip stocks, and Blue Heron… top-flight recordings… Blue Heron performs to their usual high standards. Their balance between blended voices and individual singers is perfect.
Limelight Recording of the Month: The Lost Music of Canterbury
Tony Way, Limelight Magazine, Australia | December 4, 2018
Listeners owe Nick Sandon and Blue Heron enormous thanks for bringing this superb music back to life in such committed and often moving performances. Do enjoy this remarkable musical resurrection. You will not be disappointed!
Gramophone: “One of the discoveries of the year” (Editor’s Choice)
Blue Heron are a multivalent group. Here they sing with two or three voices to a part, using adult trebles for the top ones, as is customary in this repertory. Their tone and approach is more reminiscent of English ensembles than most mixed American choirs I can think of (more full-bodied than Pomerium, for example, or even some English groups one could name). As the final volume of a long-term project, it is right that this should count among the most polished, but I suspect that their sound may take some listeners by surprise. At full stretch there isn’t a weak link from top to bottom, and at their best (that is, usually) the trebles stand comparison with those of far better-known ensembles either side of the Atlantic: try the Mass that forms the centrepiece here.
By and large the series has focused on music whose performance is only possible through Sandon’s ministrations. Among the high points of previous installments are three antiphons by Hugh Aston (Vol 1), Nicholas Ludford’s Missa Regnum mundi and a Salve regina by Richard Pygott (Vol 2). Those names will be familiar to aficionados of this repertory, but here the focus is on figures who are either really obscure or actually nameless. Don’t let that put you off: the 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. The confident rendition of Hugh Sturmy’s Exultet in hac die sets the tone and the more extended Ve nobis miseris by John Mason gives the male voices a chance to show off, but in the Mass things get seriously impressive. I doubt whether I’ll be alone in thinking this one of the discoveries of the year.
Musicweb-International: Music from The Peterhouse Partbooks
…the ladies of this American group sing with a beauty and a purity almost unrivalled… I cannot praise these recordings too highly; they have opened my ears not only to this rare repertoire but also to a choir and a vocal sound and timbre which I find gripping and highly enjoyable.
Christmas in Medieval England: “Strongly Recommended”
The New York Times: “Deeply affecting”
The superb vocalists progress from Advent to Christmas Day, switching easily between Latin and Old English, building a collection of music that might have been heard in the 1440s.
A listener then would have been lucky to hear these works brought off with such panache. The program is by turns pensive and lively, and the scholarship required to evoke stylistic accuracy is put totally at the service of performance. There’s a deeply affecting edge to the singing, whether in an atmospheric account of the still-familiar “Veni, Veni Emanuel,” or the glorious, elevated Sanctus from the anonymous “Missa Veterem Hominem.”
Du Fay CD “makes you sit up and pay attention”
Blue Heron’s qualities include transparency of tone without the perception of too much intellectually imposed constraint. In other words, their performances are highly enjoyable. Masterpieces such as Mon cuer me fait tous dis penser have a sense of freedom and airy lightness which is very appealing, with all of those delicious moments savoured without being overly lingered upon. There is a lot of individual colour between the voices in this ensemble, but somehow it all works splendidly. Timbres are allowed to emerge from the music with a natural feel but have also been carefully considered. You don’t sense it as effort, but a lot of work has gone into creating these sounds, and I for one feel privileged to be able to revel in such a subtly shaped set of performances.
Collectively this is a very fine programme. The risk with such an endeavour is that things start to sound too much the same from beginning to end, but this is the kind of recording that makes you sit up and pay attention – here from a moment of beautiful stillness, there from some sparing notes from an instrument or a special antiphonal effect – there is plenty that is memorable here, and always the anticipation of something juicy to relish just around the corner. You can’t ask much more than that from a CD.
Four Stars in the Financial Times for Christmas in Medieval England
Metcalfe’s small choir, recorded live, allows the music’s sweetness, its modest sense of joy, to speak for itself.
CD Hot List: “Rick’s Pick”
And stepping back even further in time…, we have yet another in the Blue Heron choir’s growing list of brilliant releases. Featuring 15th-century works by John Dunstaple, Leonel Power, and a variety of anonymous composers, this music is more astringent and austere-sounding than the lush polyphony of Stile Antico’s program, but the singing is every bit as skillful and there’s actually a higher density of familiar Christmas melodies here: “Veni, veni, Emanuel,” “Hayl Mary, Ful of Grace,” “Nowel: Owt of Your Sleep Aryse,” etc. In fact, in its variety and energy this album reminds me of the best Christmas recordings of another legendary Boston early-music ensemble, the Boston Camerata. Very highly recommended.
Music from the Peterhouse Partbooks, vol. 4 “Sweet and burnished tone”
Like a glass of cool water after a long walk in the desert, the fourth installment… of music from the Peterhouse Partbooks is finally here. And like its predecessors, this one presents gorgeous and previously-unheard music by practically unknown composers, all sung with the sweet and burnished tone and colorful but seamless blend that are Blue Heron’s hallmark. No classical collection can afford to pass up any disc in this series.
Alex Ross: Jones makes “canny use of musical space,” while Blue Heron’s singing is “immaculate and alive”
The superb Boston-based choir Blue Heron have released Music from the Peterhouse Partbooks, vol. 4, featuring works of Robert Jones, Nicholas Ludford, and Robert Hunt in reconstructions by Nick Sandon. Almost nothing is known about Jones (fl. 1520-35), yet his Missa Spes nostra is, as Scott Metcalfe writes in his notes, the “unique creation of a mature composer with a distinct individual voice.” Flowing vocal lines are interspersed with tart, ambiguous harmonies; there is a canny use of musical space, a sense of height and depth to the unfolding structures. As on previous releases, the singing is both precise and fluid, immaculate and alive. In Robert Hunt’s Stabat mater, another remarkable piece by an otherwise unknown composer, the choir swells to a darkly splendid climax at “Stabat natus sic contentus / Ad debellandum Sathanam,” the latter name slicing through the air.
“Most heartily recommended”
Ludford’s Marian votive antiphon Ave cujus conceptio is pure joy and a major discovery. I would fully endorse Sandon’s claim that Ludford [is] ‘a highly individual, imaginative, resourceful and polished composer, fit to be ranked alongside Taverner’ – high praise! The choir does Ludford ample justice, dipping and soaring effortlessly in his long-drawn phrases while pointing up the pervasive but never rigid imitation that binds the textures together and prefigures the procedures of such as Tallis and Byrd….
[L]ike Jones’s Mass, [Hunt’s Stabat Mater] is a step on the way towards a style – akin to the more ascetic type of late-Perpendicular architecture – that might have become one of the norms in post-Trent England had the Edwardian Reformation not intervened. Here again both the singing and the crystal-clear recording do justice to a hugely enjoyable work, not least at the dramatic cries of ‘Crucifige!’ and in the extended, heart-stirring Amen.
The Fourth Peterhouse CD: “Strongly recommended”
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.…the entire series to date is worth the purchase…. Strongly recommended.
The Fourth Peterhouse CD: “Sweet Devotional Expressiveness”
With the fourth volume in its series of recordings drawing from the Peterhouse Partbooks, the Blue Heron ensemble continues to present little-heard treasures of Renaissance polyphony with its trademark combination of rich, creamy blend and crystalline tonal purity. Only a handful of choirs in the world can do what Blue Heron does, and among American ensembles it is nearly unique in the sweet devotional expressiveness of its sound. (A “Rick’s Pick” for September 2015).
“Balanced and Elegant”
There is something exhilarating in hearing vocal music for the first time, whether that music be new or old – and that is in addition to the pleasures of hearing familiar vocal works presented by new performers. Among the roster of old but never-before-heard pieces, those in the Peterhouse Partbooks from the early 16th century are especially fascinating for scholarly reasons, and highly worthy for musical ones as well. … The fourth Blue Heron Choir release includes Ave cujus conceptio by Ludford (c. 1490-1557); a moving and beautifully proportioned four-section Missa Spes nostra by Robert Jones (flourished 1520-35); an extended and lovely Stabat mater by Robert Hunt (early 16th century); and a brief Sarum plainchant, Kyrie Deus creator omnium. The choir’s sound is balanced and elegant, Scott Metcalfe’s leadership is impeccable, and the recording provides rare insight into music of its time and a most welcome chance to hear some very fine works that have lain unperformed for century upon century.
One of the Top Five Releases of the Year (“Want List”)
In a year of excellent choral releases, Blue Heron’s third entry in their Peterhouse Partbooks series took pride of place. Their combination of technical acuity and great care over expressive phrasing continues to impress, long after other ensembles that place maximum emphasis on internal balance fade slightly into the background.
Volume Three is “an essential purchase”
As was the case for the previous two volumes, this disc represents world-premiere recordings of the featured works: a parody Mass by Nicholas Ludford, a restored version of the obscure John Mason’s Ave prima fuit salus, and a selection of Sarum plainchant. The Mason piece in particular is rather strange and quite wonderful, and the Blue Heron choir’s sound is sumptuously rich as always. An essential purchase for all early music and choral collections. (A “Rick’s Pick” for October 2013.)
Third Volume of the Peterhouse Series Reviewed in The Boston Globe
Blue Heron’s series of exemplary recordings of this repertoire … continue with a third release, pairing “Ave fuit prima salus,” a stately, dark-hued antiphon by the largely unknown John Mason, with the serenely florid “Missa Inclina cor meum” by Nicholas Ludford, a prolific composer who nevertheless seems to have given up composing rather than adapt to newer Reformation styles.
The performances are suffused with elegance and polish, but, as with other releases in the series, what is equally compelling is the play of time: bygone, deliberately antiquarian relics reintroduced into the modern world as pristine artifacts; intense, expressively heightened dramas that unfold in a kind of purified, meditative slow motion.
2012 Want List
Blue Heron gets included on my list both for the quality of its performances, which are equal to the finest that can be found in Europe, and for its ongoing recording project devoted to the so-called Peterhouse Partbooks. The emphasis is on English sacred music from the first half of the 16th century, and roughly half of the contents are unique to this source. A nod of respect is also due to Nick Sandon, who has done very important restoration work since the early 1980s on the missing tenor book, and the beginning and conclusion of the treble book that have vanished as well.
From “Sounds of America: The Scene”
Blue Heron is a virtuoso vocal ensemble that specialises in 15th- and 16th-century English and European church music. The Boston-based ensemble sing five-part Renaissance polyphony, works that run the gamut from the sacred to the secular by composers whose names may not be familiar to everyone. For these concerts at the First Church in Cambridge Congregational, the 15 men and women of Blue Heron perform works by Dufay, Josquin, Obrecht, Brumel and others to celebrate Christmas. While pre-Baroque music may seem intimidating to some, Blue Heron’s sound is a revelation – fresh, dynamic and vibrant, making a welcome change from the well-known Christmas oratorios. This is pristine, urgent and wondrous music-making of the highest order.
Early Music Review Hails the Second Peterhouse CD
I was hugely impressed with the first CD in this admirable series exploring the neglected choral music of the Peterhouse Partbooks, and this second volume has been well worth waiting for. The random loss of one of the Tenor partbooks from the set and damage to a Treble book has meant that the composers, whose work was uniquely preserved here, were equally randomly consigned to a ‘second division’ in many minds simply due to the fact that their music missed out on the early stages of the rediscovery of English Renaissance choral music. Reconstruction work by Nick Sandon has now restored most of the contents, and composers such as Pygott and Ludford are beginning to be compared favourably in stature to their established contemporaries.
Ludford received a boost when several of his masses were recorded by The Cardinall’s Musick and revealed as considerable masterpieces, and this process continues with the present performance of his hitherto unrecorded Missa Regnum mundi. Based in Boston (USA), Blue Heron has specialised for over a decade in the music of this period and produces a spectacularly rich and accurate sound, with beautifully delineated articulation. Presenting the polyphony in the context of a partial liturgical reconstruction of a Sarum rite celebration of a Mass for St Margaret, the singers perform the chant with great assurance, negotiating even the treacherous contours of the Sarum Kyrie Conditor and the Alleluya with an engaging degree of familiarity such as their Renaissance counterparts would have enjoyed, so that the polyphony seems to rise organically from these strong roots. A lengthy dissertation on performance pitch in the notes seems in practice to boil down to an upward transposition of a semitone from modern A440, so no interstellar high trebles here. However, if anything it is the lower voices which carry much of the argument in Ludford’s polyphony and which are given rightful prominence here.
But what polyphony this is! Even as a hardened reviewer and performer/director of polyphony (including several mass settings by Ludford), I was transported by the exquisite beauty of this Mass, and found myself sitting in semi-darkness luxuriating in the genius of Ludford’s intertwining vocal lines. Pygott’s enormous Salve regina, running in this recording to almost 23 minutes of intricate polyphony, is in the more conservative idiom of the Eton Choirbook and is given an equally intelligent and exquisitely unhurried performance. I cannot recommend this superb CD highly enough – it is the sort of recording to listen to in awe at the sustained and unerring skill of the performers and the burgeoning brilliance of the composers (and their unobtrusive editor), and to shed a quiet tear for the untold treasures that have been lost.
Many voices: Blue Heron brings a hint of the Baroque to Renaissance polyphony
Read the full review
Fortunately, fresh ideas about Renaissance performance are proliferating…
Among recent CDs in the polyphonic field, a recording by the Boston ensemble Blue Heron stands out, and not only because of the group’s pleasingly quirky name. The director of Blue Heron is Scott Metcalfe… His aim is to bring expressive intensity, even a hint of Baroque flair, to the earlier repertory…
The new Blue Heron disk … gathers five-part religious pieces by English composers of the early Tudor period: Robert Jones, John Mason, and, most significant, Hugh Aston… Only ten pieces by Aston survive, but they reveal a composer with a knack for generating brilliant climaxes from simple material…
Of course, my sense of Aston’s voice owes much to Blue Heron’s imaginative realization of his scores. Through an array of interpretive choices—fine gradations of dynamics; pungent diction; telling contrasts of ethereal and earthly timbres; tempos that are more lusty than languid; a way of propelling a phrase toward a goal—the music takes on narrative momentum, its moods dovetailing with the theme of the text. Listen to the brazen, almost raucous tone of the sopranos as they arrive, in “Ave Maria dive matris Anne,” at the self-reflexive phrase “psallentes et omnes hoc Ave Maria”—”and all singing this Hail Mary.” Or to the joyous thrust of the basses in the Amen coda of Aston’s “Gaude virgo mater Christi,” as they repeat a phrase in which one interval keeps widening, from a third to a fourth and, finally, to a fifth…
The seemingly serene music of Renaissance church ritual did not stem from yoga-like spells of meditation. Instead, as Andrew Kirkwood observes, it communicated a desperate plea for mercy—in particular, “the desire to shorten the time in purgatory that, short of sainthood and immediate passage to paradise, would follow earthly life.” … It is good to feel a hint of turbulence, of mortal fear, in performances such as Blue Heron’s…; with that quiver of passion, the music inspires even greater awe.
