Joel Cohen

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.

"A really nice selection of American patriotic music from the Revolution to the onset of the Civil War. The performances are excellent. It includes some of the best work, including his patriotic anthem Chester, by the outstanding New England choral composer William Billings."

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.