Congratulations to HSBA Member, BLUE HERON for winning the 2018 Gramophone Classical Music Award for Early Music!

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Blue Heron, directed by Scott Metcalfe, has won the 2018 Gramophone Classical Music Award for Early Music. Gramophone, the British magazine widely recognized as a leading international authority in classical music, made the announcement today on its website.

 

The Gramophone Classical Music Awards, often called the “British Grammys”, are widely regarded as the most influential and prestigious classical music awards in the world. This is the first time in its 41-year history that the prize for Early Music has gone to a North American ensemble.

 

The Early Music Award for 2018 recognizes Blue Heron’s recording Music from the Peterhouse Partbooks, Volume 5, the capstone to the ensemble’s pathbreaking series of performances and recordings of music from this single manuscript source, which is the largest and most important extant source for repertoire from the golden age of English cathedral music. The missing music in some fifty works has now been restored by the English musicologist Nick Sandon. Gramophone‘s review of the winning disc described it as “one of the discoveries of the year”.

 

“It is an extraordinary honor and thrill to have our nearly two decades of work with the music in the Peterhouse partbooks recognized with such a distinguished award,” said Scott Metcalfe. “And I’m pleased beyond words that the Gramophone Award may win greater recognition for the marvelous Peterhouse repertoire and for Nick Sandon’s essential and brilliant restorations, the fruit of a lifetime’s work. We are deeply grateful for the tremendous enthusiasm of our fans, and for the generous support of the donors, led by our Peterhouse Partners, who made it possible for us to realize this dream.”

 

A boxed set, The Lost Music of Canterbury, which includes all five CDs in the series, along with revised and expanded notes by Scott Metcalfe and Nick Sandon, will be released in September. (Pre-order it here.)

 

Scott Metcalfe and Nick Sandon will attend the award dinner in London on September 13. The event will be broadcast via live-stream to a worldwide audience, on the world’s leading online classical music channel, medici.tv. Watch your email for details!

 

We hope to see you soon: Blue Heron’s 20th subscription season opens in October.