Music for Canterbury Cathedral

 

The renowned professional vocal ensemble Blue Heron brings to The Cloisters music from the Peterhouse partbooks, the late-Tudor English polyphony that launched it to international attention. Acclaimed by The Boston Globe as "one of the Boston music community's indispensables" and by Alex Ross of The New Yorker for its "expressive intensity", Blue Heron will bring a thrilling program of music from the largest extant source of English pre-reformation polyphony (copied c.1540), the Peterhouse partbooks. The partbooks have been a focus of the ensemble's activities since its first concert in 1999, and it has released three CDs of works from this source to date. Many are world-premiere recordings. The first volume was praised at some length by Alex Ross in The New Yorker. (The full text is now available on his blog, here.) The fourth CD will feature all the works on the April 13 program.

In 2001, Blue Heron gave the North American premiere performance of Robert Jones's Missa Spes nostra in Boston. The performance revealed the Mass to be the mature work of a master. Full of supple melody and lustrous harmony, it still speaks to us across a divide of four and a half centuries. The work, like all the works on this program, comes from a source copied around 1540 for the new choral foundation at Canterbury Cathedral. Following Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries, Canterbury was refounded, and in need of music; and so it commissioned Thomas Bull, a musician and scribe, to copy music at Magdalen College, Oxford. He did so, apparently in some haste. Four of the five partbooks he copied have survived and are known today as the Peterhouse partbooks. In the edition used by Blue Heron, the missing tenor part, and some parts of the treble line (where pages are missing) have been reconstructed by the brilliant musicologist and composer, Prof. Nick Sandon.

 

Jones' unforgettable Mass will be offered alongside another from the Peterhouse partbooks, Robert Hunt's Stabat Mater, a work that is quite simply unlike anything you have heard before. The performances this season are the North American premieres of these works. In October, the program was presented in Kansas City, at Yale University's Institute of Sacred Music, at Boston University and at Assumption College in Worcester, MA. Audiences have loved it!