Upcoming Concerts & Performances
10 upcoming concerts and performances from Boston Early Music Festival, with dates, venues and ticket links taken from the organization’s own pages and refreshed weekly. All classical in Greater Boston →
Fri Oct 16 · 7:30pm
Stile Antico sings a tour of Renaissance Europe's musical cities — papal Rome, scholarly Paris, and the port cities of Lisbon and Seville grown rich on treasure from newly charted parts of the globe — with music by Monteverdi, Palestrina and Tallis. The twelve-voice ensemble has performed without a conductor since forming in 2005.
Sat Nov 7 · 7:30pm
William Christie and Paul Agnew direct Les Arts Florissants together for the first time since the ensemble's fortieth anniversary in 2019, in a programme of Monteverdi madrigals running from pure polyphony to elaborate dance settings. It ends with Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda.
Sat Nov 28 – Sun Nov 29 · 8pm/3pm
Sat Nov 28 · 8pm / Sun Nov 29 · 3pm
John Frederick Lampe's burlesque sets the Pyramus and Thisbe scene from A Midsummer Night's Dream, with material borrowed from Purcell's Fairy Queen. Paul O'Dette and Stephen Stubbs are the musical directors, Marie-Nathalie Lacoursière stages and choreographs it, and Robert Mealy leads the band.
Fri Dec 4 · 7:30pm
Peter Phillips brings the Tallis Scholars back for their thirty-eighth consecutive season at this festival, with Renaissance settings written in honour of the Virgin Mary by Josquin, Tallis, Lassus, Praetorius and Schütz. The group has spent five decades making Renaissance sacred polyphony a standard concert repertoire.
Sun Dec 13 · 4:00pm
Sébastien Daucé directs Ensemble Correspondances in Charpentier's Messe de minuit pour Noël, H. 9, a Christmas Eve mass whose movements are built on traditional French carols. The festival describes it as a work where liturgical and popular traditions meet in the same music, candid but emotionally deep.
Fri Feb 19
Ruckus makes its festival debut with German music from the dawn of the Enlightenment — Bach, Biber and Buxtehude. The band sets the early-music movement's methods against the groove of American roots playing, a combination The New Yorker described as "rough-edged intensity".
Sun Feb 28
Music for female voices by Hildegard von Bingen and by anonymous composers of Santa María la Real de Las Huelgas, one of medieval Spain's most prestigious convents. Trio Mediæval was founded in Oslo in 1997 and sings this repertoire in three parts.
Sun Apr 25
A recorder consort that plays entirely from memory and without a conductor, in a Renaissance programme moving between lamentation and celebration. Past guests of the biennial festival, they appear on the annual concert series for the first time here. The consort's instruments are modern reconstructions of Renaissance recorders in a full range of sizes.
Sun Jun 6 – Sun Jun 13
Telemann's Emma und Eginhard, first staged in Hamburg in 1728, is the centrepiece opera of the twenty-fourth biennial festival. It draws on the legend of Charlemagne's daughter Emma, who carried her lover Eginhard, the emperor's secretary, across the snow so that his footprints would not give him away. Lampe's The Dragon of Wantley returns as the festival's chamber opera.
Sat Jun 12 · 8:00pm
John Frederick Lampe's 1736 burlesque sends up Handelian opera: a dragon is eating Yorkshire and only the local squire can stop it, if he will put down his beer. It ran for forty-five years, the most performed opera in eighteenth-century England. Paul O'Dette and Stephen Stubbs conduct; Gilbert Blin directs this encore of BEMF's 2023 staging.
