Early Music

Early-music nation has taken to the streets. Like Wagnerians at the shrine of Bayreuth or diehard Sox fans at Fenway, the early-music pilgrims flooding the city for the Boston Early Music Festival are a passionately devoted group. They queued outside of Emmanuel Church on Thursday afternoon to hear the Orlando Consort, a distinguished British vocal quartet, as part of a marathon week of concerts. Some concertgoers were happily branded with festival shirts and bags. Many clutched the thick program book and wore backpacks suggesting a long day of urban concert-hopping.

CAMBRIDGE - Boston has a well-earned reputation as an exceptional early-music town. Even so, last weekend was unusual for the abundance of choral talent on display. Friday saw a performance by Blue Heron, the city's own outstanding early-music vocal group, while the Tallis Scholars - for many years the standard-bearers in this repertory - were due for a Saturday concert in the Boston Early Music Festival series. One of Blue Heron's hallmarks is the deep resplendence of its sound.

NEW YORK - For the 75th birthday of a New York musical icon, Philip Glass, the city arranged a sellout Carnegie Hall crowd and the US premiere of his Symphony No. 9. The work was performed by the American Composers Orchestra under the direction of frequent advocate Dennis Russell Davies, and on the composer's exact birthday. The celebration was a signal of both Glass's achievement and his fame. His music is oeuvre and brand, evolving through his long career in all directions - operatic, symphonic, monumental, lyrical - yet all immediately recognizable as his. Glass has, indeed, come...

NEW YORK - For the 75th birthday of a New York musical icon, Philip Glass, the city arranged a sellout Carnegie Hall crowd and the US premiere of his Symphony No. 9. The work was performed by the American Composers Orchestra under the direction of frequent advocate Dennis Russell Davies, and on the composer's exact birthday. The celebration was a signal of both Glass's achievement and his fame. His music is oeuvre and brand, evolving through his long career in all directions - operatic, symphonic, monumental, lyrical - yet all immediately recognizable as his. Glass has, indeed, come...

EARLY MUSIC AMERICA YOUNG PERFORMERS FESTIVAL University of Georgia Collegium Musicum; Stony Brook Baroque Players; Harvard Early Music Society At: First Church, Boston, Monday (continues through Saturday; schedule at www.earlymusic.org/early-music-america-young-performers-festival) In addition to its official programs, the Boston Early Music Festival features a full slate of fringe concerts. Early Music America is presenting a particularly ambitious fringe series this year in the form of a Young Performers Festival: concerts by 14 college, university, and conservatory...

CAMBRIDGE - Boston has a well-earned reputation as an exceptional early-music town. Even so, last weekend was unusual for the abundance of choral talent on display. Friday saw a performance by Blue Heron, the city's own outstanding early-music vocal group, while the Tallis Scholars - for many years the standard-bearers in this repertory - were due for a Saturday concert in the Boston Early Music Festival series. One of Blue Heron's hallmarks is the deep resplendence of its sound.

JEREMY EICHLER'S PICKS ■BEST BSO PERFORMANCES Works by Ades, Sibelius and Tchaikovsky, led by Thomas Ades; Harbison's Fifth Symphony under Jiri Belohlavek; Beethoven's "Eroica" Symphony under Christoph von Dohnanyi at Tanglewood ■BEST SOLO RECITAL Jeremy Denk performing Ligeti and Bach, presented by Gardner Museum ■BEST OPERAS Boston Lyric Opera's production of "The Emperor of Atlantis"; Opera Boston's production of "Cardillac....

CAMBRIDGE - What exactly did the Vikings sound like when they recited the verses of their great epic poem, the Edda, in their great halls in the 7th or 8th century? There is no way of knowing, of course, but the brilliant American-born medievalist Benjamin Bagby has come up with his own imaginative and harrowing guess in “The Rheingold Curse.’’ This 2001 work is a setting of the parts of the Edda devoted to the German-origin folk tales (tales crossed Europe easily in those days)

The 13th Boston Early Music Festival opened Monday night with a rather unfestive concert by the prominent Dutch early-music ensemble Camerata Trajectina. The program consisted of Dutch seafaring songs from the 17th century presented by three singers -- tenor Nico van der Meel, soprano Hieke Meppelink, and baritone Hans Wijers (the best voice) -- and four instrumentalists who sometimes joined in for the choruses. The liveliest of the players was Saskia Coolen, a nimble-fingered, long-breathed recorder virtuoso with a big personality.

The rise of the early music movement in recent decades has meant, among other things, a narrowing of the repertoire for modern symphony orchestras. These days, it’s relatively rare to hear an orchestra like the BSO play Baroque or early classical music, as that stretch of the musical timeline has become the province of specialized period instrument ensembles. Every once in a while, however, an emissary from the early music world can be spotted on the podium of a modern symphony orchestra, coaxing it to think differently about tempo and phrasing, to shed some of the weight in...

JEREMY EICHLER'S PICKS ■BEST BSO PERFORMANCES Works by Ades, Sibelius and Tchaikovsky, led by Thomas Ades; Harbison's Fifth Symphony under Jiri Belohlavek; Beethoven's "Eroica" Symphony under Christoph von Dohnanyi at Tanglewood ■BEST SOLO RECITAL Jeremy Denk performing Ligeti and Bach, presented by Gardner Museum ■BEST OPERAS Boston Lyric Opera's production of "The Emperor of Atlantis"; Opera Boston's production of "Cardillac....

The Boston Early Music Festival (BEMF) opera company will complete its residency in Salem's historic Old Town Hall (32 Derby Square) tomorrow as concludes its rehearsals  and preparations for its fourth annual Chamber Opera Series production at Jordan Hall at the New England Conservatory of Music on Saturday and Sunday. The performance will feature an international cast of singers, instrumentalists and Baroque dancers. About 32 artists and crew members spent the last two weeks in Salem for intensive rehearsals.

THE ENGLISH CONCERT Harry Bicket, director With Andreas Scholl, countertenor Presented by Celebrity Series of Boston, in association with the Boston Early Music Festival At: Jordan Hall, Sunday Early-music groups can have varied ambitions. Some emphasize the past's mysterious distance; some make the past prophetically up to date. Some evoke rusticity; some conjure lavish architecture. But in their Sunday performance at Jordan Hall, jointly presented by the Celebrity Series of Boston and the Boston Early Music Festival, the English Concert revealed themselves...

EARLY MUSIC AMERICA YOUNG PERFORMERS FESTIVAL University of Georgia Collegium Musicum; Stony Brook Baroque Players; Harvard Early Music Society At: First Church, Boston, Monday (continues through Saturday; schedule at www.earlymusic.org/early-music-america-young-performers-festival) In addition to its official programs, the Boston Early Music Festival features a full slate of fringe concerts. Early Music America is presenting a particularly ambitious fringe series this year in the form of a Young Performers Festival: concerts by 14...

BOSTON EARLY MUSIC FESTIVAL Concerts, fringe events, workshops, an exhibition, and more. Operatic centerpiece: Steffani’s “Niobe, Regina di Tebe’’ (June 12-19) Cutler Majestic Theatre. Kristian Bezuidenhout, fortepiano and harpsichord, in concert with the BEMF Orchestra (June 16); three other appearances (June 17, 18). Festival runs June 12-19. Venues vary. 617-661-1812, www.bemf.org Kristian Bezuidenhout was in college the first time he tried playing the fortepiano, predecessor of today’s pianos.

The Boston Early Music Festival introduced its fall chamber opera series just two years ago but it has already become one of the organization’s marquee offerings. Previously BEMF had only its biennial festival as an outlet for its visually distinctive and musically vibrant approach to Baroque opera. Now it enjoys an expanded presence and a local following that appears to be growing. For this weekend’s third installment of the series, devoted to Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas,’’ a second Jordan Hall performance was...

The first thing to remember about Kate Bush is that she's never been concerned with staying ahead of the curve. In fact, she's rarely been anywhere on the curve. Her approach to music, starting in the late 1970s, has been a cosmic vision uniquely her own, where synthesizers compete with Hammond organs and calypso arrangements. If her early music sounds dated now, it's because it was never in vogue to begin with. "Aerial," her new double album out today on Columbia, is her first in 12 years, but it could easily have come out any time in Bush's career arc. Which is to...

Handel's "Messiah" is inexhaustible, and so apparently is the pipeline of British conductors with fresh ideas about it. Harry Christophers, the leader of the early music vocal ensemble The Sixteen, was this year's guest conductor of the Handel and Haydn Society's annual performances at Symphony Hall. This was the society's 154th consecutive season of "Messiah," a number that must be impressive even to Britons. Christophers's reading was a revelation, no more so than last year's by harpsichordist Laurence Cummings, but in a different direction.

CAMBRIDGE - What exactly did the Vikings sound like when they recited the verses of their great epic poem, the Edda, in their great halls in the 7th or 8th century? There is no way of knowing, of course, but the brilliant American-born medievalist Benjamin Bagby has come up with his own imaginative and harrowing guess in “The Rheingold Curse.’’ This 2001 work is a setting of the parts of the Edda devoted to the German-origin folk tales (tales crossed Europe easily in those days)

The rise of the early music movement in recent decades has meant, among other things, a narrowing of the repertoire for modern symphony orchestras. These days, it’s relatively rare to hear an orchestra like the BSO play Baroque or early classical music, as that stretch of the musical timeline has become the province of specialized period instrument ensembles. Every once in a while, however, an emissary from the early music world can be spotted on the podium of a modern symphony orchestra, coaxing it to think differently about tempo and phrasing, to shed...