EMA News Features & Press Releases

Jean-Joseph Mouret’s comic 'Les fêtes de Thalie,' an opera-ballet, was a hit in early 18th-c. Paris. Now the period-instrument Opera Lafayette, conducted by Christophe Rousset, is set to give its modern premiere, with a production that's contemporary (and maybe a little zany) in look and choreography.

Julia Dokter is a musicologist and organist who 'messes around' with art. In a personal essay, she walks us through several of her re-imagined Medieval illuminations. Hand-drawing and painting these images, she writes, 'allows me to learn different things about [early music] than I would by researching and analyzing them in the usual academic ways.'

For most of us, the early-music repertoire is so great it needs no special pleading -- even as attendance numbers might suggest otherwise. So what works in early-music programming? Who's been successful at audience engagement, and how do presenters select their historical performance projects?

Facing budget cuts and with shifting educational priorities, the College of Music at the University of North Texas, in Denton, plans to eliminate its harpsichord lecturer position and hire a professor of organ and harpsichord.

On March 8, the violin of Alan Choo, concertmaster and assistant artistic director of Apollo’s Fire, was stolen. Choo and his friends and colleagues have been sharing his “Cash Reward: $2,500” poster on social media—including a “no questions asked” plea for the return of the instrument.   

The definition of early music is always expanding, and this Early Music Month we look into traditional kora music from West Africa, which predates the European Baroque. Next week, New York's Music Before 1800 presents Malian kora master Ballaké Sissoko and South African guitarist Derek Gripper in recital, an initiative to explore not 'world music' but 'specific niches of historical music that deserve an equal spotlight.'

'The kinds of roles written for my voice type, as an operatic bass,' writes Michael Galvin in a personal essay, 'have never fit the roles that have excited me as a stage performer. It’s why I’ve been so drawn to early music — the farther back one goes in history, the more the lines blur between what is prescribed and what is possible.'

Biblical oratorios by Handel and Bach are cornerstones of a vast repertoire filled with forgotten treasures. New York's Academy of Sacred Drama is reviving these often-gorgeous obscurities, one show at a time. Led by violinist Jeremy Rhizor, their latest discovery is 'Santa Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi,' with performances this week. 'The oratorios exist as literary narratives as well as stories of Biblical histories and lessons.'

You can now watch EMA's extraordinary 2023 Emerging Artists Showcase, with three headliners. To introduce their performance, a member of The Fooles here offers insights into new postures and techniques required of this 17th-c. repertoire. And period-instrument ensembles everywhere should take note of their brilliant tuning regimen, where tuning fickle instruments isn't a disruption but an engaging part of the show.

Like a jukebox musical, a pasticcio opera takes hit tunes from an artist or era and stitches them together with a bespoke plot. Celebrating its 40th anniversary, Portland Baroque Orchestra is set to perform 'Dinner with Handel,' a pasticcio where the great composer is caught in a surprise dinner party—revealing the man and his complicated relationships.