Blue Heron (vocal ensemble)

Blue Heron, directed by Scott Metcalfe, is a professional vocal ensemble based in the Boston area. The ensemble presents an annual concert series in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and performs throughout New England as well as touring the US; it made its European debut in the United Kingdom in 2017.

Blue Heron's repertoire extends from plainchant to new music, with a particular focus on 15th- and 16th-century polyphony. Its performing style is informed by the rigorous study of original source materials and historical performance practice, with the general goal of expressing the text dramatically and revealing the music's rhetorical momentum. The group has experimented with the historical pronunciation of Latin and other languages, vocal scoring, the use of instruments, and pitch level. Alex Ross in ''The New Yorker'' described the ensemble as offering "imaginative realizations" of earlier repertory.

The ensemble has recorded a number of CDs; the fifth disc in the ''Music from the Peterhouse Partbooks'' series won the 2018 Gramophone Classical Music Award for Early Music, having previously been selected by ''Gramophone'' as an Editor's Choice, and a Critic's Choice for 2017. Provided by Wikipedia