The Baltimore Consort

Wassail! Wassail!

Friday, December 14, 2012
8 pm (preconcert lecture at 7 pm)
Town Hall Seattle

 
A series favorite, the popular American ensemble offers music for the Yuletide season, with its always festive cornucopia of instruments – lute, cittern, viols, crumhorns, recorders, rebec and percussion. The Consort offers old carols and dance tunes from the British Isles, Germany, France, Spain and the New World, in an annual and ever-changing seasonal celebration.

The Baltimore Consort has delighted audiences on both sides of the Atlantic and earned their CDs a place on the Billboard Magazine Top-Ten list. The Consort’s arrangements of early music from England, Scotland, France, Italy, and Spain speak to the heart as well as the mind, and their love for the early music of English/Scottish heritage has led them to delve into the rich trove of traditional balladry and dance tunes preserved in the Appalachian Mountains and Nova Scotia. More recently, the group has explored the extraordinary repertory from the Iberian Peninsula in a program entitled “Cancionero: Early Music from Spain.”

This fall marks the beginning of the group’s 31st season as one of America’s favorite early music ensembles. The Consort has made fourteen recordings on the Dorian label and has toured widely in the United States, Canada, and Europe.

“Few early music players have more fun making music than the Baltimore six…”
-The New Yorker

The Consort has held residencies at the Walters Art Gallery and the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore, and the Piccolo Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina. Performances on programs such as Performance Today, St. Paul Sunday, Millennium of Music, Harmonia, and Onstage (CBC) have broadcast their music far and wide. Recordings on the Dorian label have earned them recognition as Top Classical-Crossover Artist of the Year (Billboard).

EMG Executive Director August Denhard shares his excitement for The Baltimore Consort’s holiday program in Seattle:
Everything about this group is very personal to me, so it’s really hard to think about them without going back to my own beginnings in early music, as a tuba player at Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore in the early ‘80s desperately attempting to find a new musical direction.

At Peabody, everyone needed to play piano as a minor, or any other in instrument that could play more than one note at a time, and the tuba definitely did not qualify. I recall the day I heard a lute player warming up in the conservatory practice hall on a weird, rounded guitar. The sound, so delicate and beautiful, stopped me in my tracks, and a few weeks later I was registered as a lute minor with an up- and- coming player, Ronn McFarlane, who had recently made the transition from rock guitar to lute.

Read the entire article here.

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