by Nicholas Stevens
Imagine a concert that highlights underperformed music from an underexamined region and an underrated historical era. Not only does the program chart logical thematic paths through that repertoire, but it also changes up group configurations often enough to keep the audience attentive.
by Daniel Hathaway
In 2013, the last time Schola Antiqua of Chicago visited the Helen D. Schubert concert series at St. John’s Cathedral in downtown Cleveland, the vocal ensemble took a look inside the world of Guillaume de Machaut. On Friday evening, February 21 at 7:30 pm, Michael Alan Anderson will lead his eight singers in “Slavic Routes: Music from Renaissance Prague.” A freewill offering will be received.
In a telephone conversation from Rochester, NY, where Anderson teaches musicology at the Eastman School of Music, the conductor noted that his singers have already performed the program in Chicago in 2016. “It’s been curated by Erika Honisch, a professor at SUNY Stony Brook, and is based on research that is soon to be released as a book.”
Anderson said that part of the mission of Schola Antiqua is to explore the canon of early vocal music, but also to draw on recent research and “to package programs under themes.” The Prague program, for example, seeks to serve up a slice of musical life in that important capital of the Holy Roman Empire around the year 1600. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
With the rise of Dante, Petrarch, Boccacio, Chaucer and the celebrated poet-musician Guillaume de Machaut, the fourteenth century was a heady era for literature in Europe. Schola Antiqua of Chicago under the direction of Michael Anderson treated the audience at St. John’s Cathedral on Friday evening, April 26, to a captivating survey of Machaut’s music and poetry. The program included his complete Mass of Our Lady interleaved with two of his twenty-three extant motets and five examples of his numerous secular songs.
Anderson, a musicologist at the Eastman School of Music who assumed the directorship of the 13-year-old ensemble in 2008, prefaced the concert with an audience-friendly introduction to Machaut’s musical style, demonstrating how the composer created tension and release and giving examples of Machaut’s spiky, double-leading-tone cadences. That probably only partly prepared the listeners for Machaut’s sound-world with its stark open fifths, sudden bursts of lush harmony and flights of hocket — the ricocheting of short notes back and forth between voices imitating hiccups that Machaut and his contemporaries got a kick out of incorporating into sacred pieces. [Read more…]