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?)

Another throwback project with the pioneering trailblazing conductor of early repetoires Joel Cohen, paired with the Camerata Mediterranea, an ensemble promoting intercultural dialogue between both sides of the sea, he recorded this beautiful program centered on the love songs of Bernard de Ventadour, the greatest troubadour of his time. Each song alternes with an Occitan poem by Uc de Saint-Circ relating the adventurous sentimental live of Bernard.

Erato brings you perhaps The Boston Camerata's most ambitious programs. Joel Cohen and his ensemble recreated 'Tristan & Iseult ' the legend of the most famous and tragic love story of the whole Western culture by mixing captivating recitations of the earliest German and French written sources with love songs from 12th and 13th centuries’ troubadours and adaptations of pieces excerpted from the famous Vienna manuscript. Now available on digital platforms, this album was an absolute hit of Medieval music at the time of its release and won unnumberable prizes. It was dedicated to the memory of star counter-tenor Henri Ledroit, who portrays Tristan.

The Boston Camerata explores again a little-known side of early music repertoire; Douce beauté (Sweet Beauty). With its accessible melody, strophic form and simplified polyphony to facilitate the understanding of the text, the air de cour marks the entry of France into the baroque era.

L’homme armé is one of the most popular French songs of the late Middle Ages. Celebrating physical strength and courage on the battlefield, it has inspired many composers, and became the most frequent cantus firmus in the Renaissance. It gave its name to this wonderful program of the Boston Camerata, highlighting musical depictions of battle scenes and lamentations over conflicts and persecutions, but also songs of hope for a pacified world.

Warner Classics presents a programme conceived by the Boston Camerata ensemble which have dedicated themselves to historically performed professional performance of early European and American Music. The American Vocalist is named after a book on canticles published in Boston in mid-19th-century, which reveals the persistence in religious chants of New England of a folk-hymnody tradition as part of a fascination for the Victorian aesthetic. This was generally regarded as a specificity of the Afro-descendant congregational music of the Southern states.