Helena Newberry

Chicago's best-known early music ensemble The Newberry Consort exhilarates with VESPERS, a collection of dazzlingly original music for women’s voices. The composer? A mysterious early-17th-century Mexican named Juan de Lienas, whose style energetically oscillates between Renaissance and Baroque elements.

The Newberry Consort is one of Chicago's leading early music organizations, building its reputation from its home at the Newberry Library. It records for the Harmonia Mundi label and regularly participates in Harmonia, a nationally syndicated radio program. Among its recording projects is a three-disc project in memory of Brown and drawing on his library materials now in the Library. The second of that series, A Candle in the Dark, was released internationally in autumn, 2000.

Every piece on this Newberry release is temperate and balanced, just as the musical culture and domestic society were in the countries now known as the Netherlands and Belgium.
While a certain blandness creeps into the instrumental selections, pieces by Nicholas a Kempis, Tarquinio Merula and John Coperario reveal a sharper, more personal profile. Most striking are the vocal-instrumental esoterica–the brightly serene "Je veux mon doux Sauveur" by an anonymous composer and the richly embellished "Avertisti faciem" by Constantijn Huygens, both works sweetly sung by the remarkable countertenor Drew Minter.