Throughout Festival Week, enjoy artwork created by children of families who have recently joined our community, having left their troubled homelands in other parts of the world. The exhibit will encircle the mainstage space at FAR Center from Opening Night, Sunday, through Friday night. During evening performances, you will be surrounded by the visual art of young children who have had to leave their homes behind, while you are immersed in the music of those who had much the same experience so many centuries ago. We are grateful to our new neighbors for sharing their artwork with us and for contributing their talents to our festival. Thank you and welcome to Bloomington!
Scheduel:
Youth Performance
5:00pm | Live Concert
The BEMI Players
The Stanley Ritchie Youth Performance
(Bloomington, IN) Join us for the second annual mainstage concert by members of the Bloomington Early Music Immersion program. A showcase of new skills and newly discovered talents, the BEMI Players performance is the highpoint of a week of daylong instruction and activities introducing middle-school aged string players to historical technique and repertoire from the Baroque era. A partnership between Bloomington Early Music and the Historical Performance Institute of the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University, with support from the Smithville Charitable Foundation and a 2023 Engagement Award from Early Music America, BEMI is free to participants and fun for all!
Venue: Trinity Episcopal Church 111 S. Grant Street
Closing Night!
8:00pm | Live Concert
Cantoría
The "Cancionero de Palacio" & Other Songs for Exiles
(Murcia, Spain) During the Franco regime, a group of well-known Spanish music critics, composers, and musicologists living in exile—along with some half-million others—dug deep into music of the Golden Age. Though scattered across the globe, Otto Mayer-Serra, Jesus Bal y Gay, Adolfo Salazar, Roberto Gerhard, Ernesto Halffter, Eduardo Martinez Torner, Jaume Pahissa and others kept in frequent contact through the musicologist and Catalan priest Higini Anglés, who remained in Spain as director of the Spanish government’s Instituto Español de Musicología. Cooperative research and intense musical discussion of this repertoire is understood to have helped these political exiles reconnect to cultural life in their homeland in a profoundly meaningful way.
Exquisitely beautiful and powerfully rousing, music of Spain’s Golden Age was patronized by—and composed to glorify—the Catholic monarchs during a time of vicious intolerance and sweeping expulsion of both Jews and Muslims. How, then, during another dangerously volatile period five centuries on, did this same music, with its problematic origins well-known, serve as a means for another group of exiles—political this time, rather than religious—to re-engage wtih their home country? This program gives us pause to consider how musical meaning shifts with time and context, as the victims and the oppressors change and the role of a particular work or repertoire changes with them.
Founded in 2016, Cantoría is a Spanish vocal quartet specializing in music of the Iberian Golden Age. Known for their distinctive, fresh approach to performance, the group’s superb musicianship, youthful energy, and vibrant stage presence create a powerful, engaged connection between early music and modern audiences. Cantoría is quickly building an international presence with numerous accolades to their name and concerts at renowned festivals and venues in Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, France, Germany, the UK, Poland, and Croatia. Their CD, Mateo Flecha “El Viejo”: Ensaladas has earned three prestigious recording awards: the Diapason Découverte Award (France), the German Record Critics Prize (Germany), and the Melómano d’Oro (Italy). Cantoría’s BLEMF 2024 performance will be their US debut.
7:15pm | Pre-Concert Discussion with Carolann Buff, early music choral scholar & BLEM board member, and Cantoría music director, Jorge Losana
Venue: Trinity Episcopal Church 111 S. Grant Street
