Ensembles

Tapestry made its debut in Jordan Hall with a performance of Steve Reich's Tehillim, deemed "a knockout" by The Boston Globe. The trademark of the Boston-based vocal ensemble is combining medieval repertory and contemporary compositions in bold, conceptual programming. Critics hail their rich distinctive voices, their "technically spot-on singing" and their emotionally charged performances. The LA Times writes "They sing beautifully separately and together with a glistening tone and precise intonation" and The Cleveland Plain Dealer describes Tapestry as "an ensemble that plants haunting vibrations, old and new, in our ears."

Most recently, Tapestry has expanded their repertoire to include works of impressionists including Debussy, Lili Boulanger and Vaughan Williams for a US tour in celebration of the 100-year anniversary of World War One Armistice, culminating with a performance at the National Gallery in Washington DC. Their newest program, Beyond Borders, builds on their impressionistic discoveries and expands to works of Duke Ellington, Samuel Barber, and Leonard Bernstein programmed with early music and folk songs.

Concert appearances include the Utrecht Early Music and the Maastricht Musica Sacra Festivals, Regensburg's Tage Alter Musik, the Flanders Festivals of Gent and Brussels, a Banco Republico tour of Colombia, Donne in Musica, Rome; Jordan Hall, Boston; Hildegard von Bingen Symposium at the University of Oregon, Eugene; Kalamazoo Medieval Conference, MI; Frick Collection and Rockefeller University, NY; Harvard University, Da Camera of Houston; Early Music Concert Series, Boulder; Denver's Newman Performing Arts Center; Da Camera Society LA; Stanford University, Museum Concert, Cleveland, festivals in Ottawa and Montreal, and many others. Tapestry also performed Steve Reich's Tehillim under the baton of Marin Alsop with the Colorado and Cabrillo Festival Symphonies. The ensemble toured Latvia and performed at the Moscow Conservatory. Recent performances include American Dreams at the Library of Congress and New York City's Frick Collection and Between Heaven and Hell at the Bucerius Foundation in Hamburg, which was broadcast by the Norddeutsche Radio. The ensemble was founded at the Longy School of Music and is in residence at First Church Congregational in Cambridge MA.

Tapestry has made 4 recordings with Telarc International: Angeli, Music of Angels; Hildegard von Bingen: Celestial Light; Song of Songs – Come into my Garden; and The Fourth River. To date Tapestry has made 2 recordings with German Label, MDG: Sapphire Night and Faces of a Woman. Sapphire Night won the Echo Prize, Germany's highest honor for a recording and The Fourth River is a past winner of Chamber Music America Recording of the Year.

Tapestry has performed with orchestras, choruses, and chamber ensembles. The core ensemble collaborates with extraordinary guest artists including James Falzone, clarinet, Shira Kammen, vielle, Arsentiy Kharitonov, piano, Nikola Radan, flute and Deborah Rentz-Moore, mezzo-soprano.

La Donna Musicale is a non-profit research, education, and performance organization devoted exclusively to the discovery, preservation, and promotion of sacred and secular music by women composers. The ensemble uses period instruments and historical performance practices.

Biography: Hailed by Early Music America for its “excellent performers … outstanding music stylishly performed,” La Donna Musicale is dedicated to the historically informed performance of music by women composers of the Renaissance, Baroque, and Classical periods. Our concerts provide “both valuable knowledge and entertainment” (Bryn Mawr), and our CDs of Antonia Bembo and Julie Pinel have been praised in Goldberg: “first-rate … a disc I will be returning to for a long time to come”; International Record Review: “first rate performances of unusually delightful music”; Notes: “warmth and impeccable accuracy”; and Early Music America: “Exacting scholarship is backed up by high quality performances.”

Since its inception, the researchers and performers of La Donna Musicale have studied more than 17 women composers, performed 150 pieces in over 80 concerts, and gathered over 1,000 works. The ensemble has premiered the works of the Milanese nun Chiara Margarita Cozzolani, the Venetian courtesan Barbara Strozzi, and the mysterious Antonia Bembo. Other composers include Julie Pinel, Bianca Maria Meda, Caterina Assandra, Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, and Madalena Casulana.

We show the European influence on Afro-American and indigenous music in Latin America, as well as how the fusion of those types of music with European classical music produced new musical genres. We recreate, preserve, and popularize the diverse multicultural aspects of the rhythmic patterns that have been passed down from the Middle Ages to today. And for this purpose we have formed a Latin-Baroque Fusion ensemble of musicians using period, folk, and contemporary popular instruments. Rumbarroco also aims to promote awareness and enjoyment of the musical and cultural similarities and distinctions between Orient and Occident, and among Jews, Christians, and Muslims, as experienced through Latin-American music. We seek to unite today’s diverse communities through the powerful transformative passion of the music we play. Finally, we employ music as a tool for cultural integration, especially for the empowerment of youth in their personal growth.

New World music made of scraps, orts,and imagination.

TELLTALE CROSSING electrifies with its fusion of eclectic musical influences and internationally acclaimed performers. Vocalists Cristi Catt and Daniela Tošić, founding members of famed early music ensemble, Tapestry (“an ensemble that plants haunting vibrations, old and new, in our ears,” Cleveland Plain Dealer), thread timeless melodies with the hypnotic avant-grooves of percussionist Taki Masuko of The Horse Flies (“a band that’s earned a buzz… swirling, addictive songs that blend tradition with invention,” Rolling Stone). Telltale Crossing routinely collaborates with an extraordinary rotating cast of characters, including clawhammer banjo master Richie Stearns (The Horse Flies, Natalie Merchant, Richie and Rosie), bassist Corey DiMario (Crooked Still), multi-instrumentalist Peter Dodge (The Horse Flies), among others.

Daniela Tosic (voice) and Sylvie Zakarian (marimba) meld unique colors of their instruments to form a new repertory: from lush arrangements of traditional melodies, and extent compositions refashioned, to collaborations with contemporary composers that highlight their singular fusion of sonorities. Syldason's inaugural program, Songs of the Other, inspired by a shared cultural background, highlights the universal plight of immigrants that transcends epoch or geography. Through song and music, Syldason hopes to reveal a common compassion that binds us all.

Blue Heron presents a subscription series in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The ensemble 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.; in California at the Berkeley Early Music Festival and Festival Mozaic in San Luis Obispo; in Chicago, Cleveland, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Montreal, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Providence, St. Louis, Seattle, and Vancouver; for a visit of His Holiness the Dalai Lama to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and in the UK in Cambridge and London. Blue Heron has been ensemble 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.

The ensemble

Blue Heron is a highly flexible performing organization which draws from a roster of musicians in order to constitute the ensemble best suited to the repertoire at hand. The ensemble may range in size from three singers (for a fifteenth-century song) to around a dozen (for a large-scale early sixteenth-century English mass) and adds instruments (slide trumpet, trombone, fiddle, harp, dulcian) when appropriate.