Joel Cohen

What these sound recordings attempt to do is to bring you face-to-face — or, perhaps more appropriately, sound to-heart — with actual works of the troubadours and, occasionally, of others in their circle of influence. The task is daunting for so many reasons: songs got written down decades, even centuries, after their dates of creation; only about ten percent of the original melodies survive; and most direct knowledge of how performers worked out their interpretations at the time has been lost. We know nothing whatsoever about the singing style, or about the techniques of instrumental accompaniment that may have been employed. These performances, therefore, of necessity, reflect a confluence of musicological and philological knowledge with performers' instincts and intuitions, as all of these tendencies interacted with each other at a specific moment in history, the late twentieth century.

Originally recorded in 1989, The Sacred Bridge contains a speculative program linking various genres of Christian and Jewish religious music, most of it medieval. The Boston Camerata continued to perform the program in various forms in subsequent years.

One would think that, with the current feelings about the US presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, there would be frequent stagings throughout the country of Kurt Weill's JOHNNY JOHNSON, his awe-inspiring anti-war "play with songs" and his first work for the American theater. (Not coincidentally, where are all productions of Joan Littlewoood's OH, WHAT A LOVELY WAR and the Gershwin/Kaufman STRIKE UP THE BAND?)

One would think that, with the current feelings about the US presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, there would be frequent stagings throughout the country of Kurt Weill's JOHNNY JOHNSON, his awe-inspiring anti-war "play with songs" and his first work for the American theater. (Not coincidentally, where are all productions of Joan Littlewoood's OH, WHAT A LOVELY WAR and the Gershwin/Kaufman STRIKE UP THE BAND?)