by Mike Telin
When we think of the Medieval period, musical variety is usually not the first thing that comes to mind. But Allison Monroe and her Trobár Medieval colleagues would beg to differ with that sentiment. “There’s a lot of variety in the repertoire,” Monroe said during a recent interview.
“And the human aspect. We just performed a Troubadour program in Chicago which included Crusade songs, love songs, and pastorals. There’s just so much in the repertoire, and the more you dig into it the more you discover that people back then were just like us. And we’re still singing about the same things today.”
On Friday January 27 at 7:00 pm at Convivium 33 Gallery, the Cleveland based Trobár Medieval will present “Daughters of Light,” which features the music and visions of two abbesses, the ninth-century Byzantine-Greek Kassia, and the twelfth-century German Hildegard von Bingen. In addition to Monroe (voice, vielle, rebec, psaltery), performers will include Elena Mullins (voice, harp, percussion), and Karin Weston (voice, flute, harp), with guest artists Rosemary Heredos and Nadia Tarnawsky.
The program will be repeated on Saturday the 28th at 7:00 pm at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Cleveland Hts. and on Sunday the 29th at 3:00 pm at St. Anselm Church in Chesterland. Performances are free, but donations are suggested. [Read more…]
Why is it that people never seem to tire of 18th-century Scottish folk songs? The moment we hear the poems of 
Ailurophiles rejoice! There’s a new opera in town, created as many French Baroque titles were back in the day, out of bits and pieces of existing material, and the principal character is a large feline. (It’s actually a princess seeking to be rehumanized through the traditional heroic means of fulfilling a series of impossible challenges or quests.)
For centuries the fairy tale of Puss in Boots, the wily cat who stops at nothing to gain power and wealth for his penniless master, has been a source of inspiration for composers and choreographers.
Time and time again, Les Délices has imbued a sense of creativity into the concert experience — particularly over the past two years, when pandemic restrictions called for some out-of-the-box thinking. On February 25 in Shaker Heights, their first in-person event since 2020 proved to be no exception, blending poetry and music for an engaging evening of storytelling.
Les Délices has once again joined forces with Boston’s Blue Heron, this time to produce the impressive video “Machaut’s Lai of the Fountain,” which debuted on Vimeo on April 8, and remains available on-demand until April 19.
Now that the cold and dreary winter is behind us, our thoughts turn to spring. And with trees beginning to blossom and flowers blooming we can begin to think about cultivating the garden. On April 8 at 7:30 pm, 
When Debra Nagy made the decision to reinvent her French Baroque ensemble Les Délices as a production company — whose interface with its subscribers would take the form of high-quality videos in the place of live concerts during the pandemic — many of us were curious to see how that would affect one of Cleveland’s cultural treasures.
Thursday’s program on Les Délices’ Concert Series is an interesting combination of imagination and circumstance: a creative recipe composed of recordings the ensemble had at hand in the fridge, or rather the archives.