by Mike Telin
On Saturday, January 17 at 8:00 pm in William Busta Gallery, and on Sunday, January 18 at 4:00 pm in Plymouth Church, Les Délices, in collaboration with Blue Heron Ensemble, Scott Metcalfe (left), director, will present a fascinating concert entitled Fourteenth Century Avant-Garde.
The performances will feature Les Délices regulars Scott Metcalfe (vielle & gothic harp) and Debra Nagy (recorders & douçaines) with special guest artists Martin Near, countertenor, and Jason McStoots, tenor. On Sunday, Metcalfe will give a pre-concert lecture beginning at 3:00 pm. [Read more…]
Fourteenth century avant-garde? “It’s one of the most exciting moments in music history for me,” Les Délices founder and artistic director Debra Nagy said during an enlightening telephone conversation. “To our ears, the music may not sound modern, yet in many respects it is some of the most rhythmically complex music that we have until the 20th century.”
There were no horses in the parade, but the procession that brought the musicians of Les Délices onstage at the Bop Stop Saturday evening hinted at the military origins of the stirring French baroque music to come. 
Through a combination of scheduling conflicts and the sin of sloth, I had never heard a performance by the highly regarded Cleveland Baroque ensemble Les Délices until Sunday afternoon May 4, in the Herr Chapel at Plymouth Church, Shaker Heights. Les Délices are artists in residence at the church, so this was home base, although they regularly perform in other venues around town. The evening before they had presented this program, “The Leading Man,” at the William Busta Gallery. These concerts ended their 2014/15 series, and the Sunday afternoon concert was, with a couple of niggling reservations – more about them later – an unalloyed pleasure.
Inspired by one of the 18th century’s most famous tenors, Pierre Jélyotte, Les Délices’s new program The Leading Man includes operatic excerpts of musical heroism, absurdist comedy, and ravishing beautythat were central to Jélyotte’s repertoire. In her program notes, Les Délices’s founder and director Debra Nagy writes: “Jelyotte appears to have cultivated nothing but admirers. [His] contemporaries remarked on his range, volume, and the velveteen beauty of his tone. … He had only to sing, and those who listened were intoxicated. All the women went mad.”
