The Boston Early Music Festival (BEMF) is universally recognized as a leader in the field of early music. Since its founding in 1980 by leading practitioners of historical performance in the United States and abroad, BEMF has promoted early music through a variety of diverse programs and activities, including an annual concert series that brings early music’s brightest stars to the Boston and New York concert stages, and the biennial weeklong Festival and Exhibition, recognized as “the world’s leading festival of early music” (The Times, London). Through its programs BEMF has earned its place as North America’s premier presenting organization for music of the Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque periods and has secured Boston’s reputation as “America’s early music capital” (Boston Globe). 

International Baroque Opera

One of BEMF’s main goals is to unearth and present lesser-known Baroque operas performed by the world’s leading musicians armed with the latest information on period singing, orchestral performance, scenic design, costuming, dance, and staging. BEMF operas reproduce the Baroque’s stunning palette of sound by bringing together today’s leading operatic superstars and a wealth of instrumental talent from across the globe to one stage for historic presentations, all zestfully led from the pit by the BEMF Artistic Directors Paul O’Dette and Stephen Stubbs, and creatively reimagined for the stage by BEMF Opera Director Gilbert Blin. BEMF introduced its Chamber Opera Series during its annual concert season in November 2008, with a performance of John Blow’s Venus and Adonis and Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Actéon. The series focuses on the wealth of chamber operas composed during the Baroque period, while providing an increasing number of local opera aficionados the opportunity to attend one of BEMF’s superb productions.

BEMF also has a well-established and highly successful project to record some of its groundbreaking work in the field of Baroque opera. The first three recordings in this series were all nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording, in 2005, 2007, and 2008: the 2003 Festival centerpiece Ariadne, by Johann Georg Conradi; Jean-Baptiste Lully’s Thésée; and the 2007 Festival opera, Lully’s Psyché, which was hailed by BBC Music Magazine as “superbly realized…magnificent.” In addition, the BEMF recordings of Lully’s Thésée and Psyché received Gramophone Award Nominations in the Baroque Vocal category in 2008 and 2009, respectively. BEMF’s fourth CD recording on the German CPO label, Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Actéon, was released in November 2010, and the fifth, John Blow’s Venus and Adonis, was released in June 2011. BEMF recorded three additional CDs in 2013. The first release, Charpentier’s La Descente d’Orphée aux Enfers and La Couronne de Fleurs on CPO, won the 2015 Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording. Steffani’s Niobe, Regina di Tebe, featuring Philippe Jaroussky and Karina Gauvin, was released in January 2015 on the Erato/Warner Classics label in conjunction with a seven-city, four-country European concert tour of the opera, has been named Gramophone’s Recording of the Month for March 2015, and has received a Diapason d’Or.

Celebrated Concerts

Some of the most thrilling musical moments at the biennial Festival occur during one of the dozen or more concerts presented around the clock, which always include the acclaimed Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra led by Orchestra Director Robert Mealy, and which often feature unique, once-in-a-lifetime collaborations and programs by the spectacular array of talent assembled for the Festival week’s events. In 1989, BEMF established an annual concert series bringing early music’s leading soloists and ensembles to the Boston concert stage to meet the growing demand for regular world-class performances of early music’s beloved classics and newly discovered works. BEMF then expanded its concert series in 2006, when it extended its performances to New York City’s Gilder Lehrman Hall at The Morgan Library & Museum, providing “a shot in the arm for New York’s relatively modest early-music scene” (New York Times).