1. Music, Drama & Dance in the Kingdom of France

Montreal's Baroque Orchestra L'Harmonie des saisons and the Burlington Baroque Festival Singers open the 2026 Festival in FESTIVE Style, featuring four of 18th century France's greatest composers,  among the most celebrated within a pantheon of great composers serving Louis XIV and Louis XV during France's Golden Age. A One Act Opera, a Grand Motet, an expansive Dance Suite, and a brilliant operatic Chaconne assure an exquisite evening of music!

Jean-Fery Rebel: The Character of the Dances

Marc-Antoine Charpentier: The Pleasures of Versailles (One Act Opera)

Jean Baptiste Lully: Chaconne from Armide 

Sebastian Brossard: Grand Motet: In convertendo dominus.

Featured soloists are:

Myriam Leblanc, soprano (Montreal)

Len Torrie, soprano (Montreal)

Nicholas Burns, alto (Vancouver)

Philippe Gagné, tenor (Quebec City)

Ryan Matos, tenor (Burlington)

Sumner Thomson, baritone (Boston)

William Kraushaar,  bass (Montreal)

With the BURLINGTON BAROQUE FESTIVAL SINGERS

 Johann Sebastian Bach assembled the monumental B minor Mass in the last years of his life, a compendium of some of his greatest works from across the length of his storied career. He viewed it as a summation of his life's work in sacred music, and had it bound in a volume that would lay ignored for decades. Without question one of the greatest masterworks in all of Western Music, the variety of styles, rhetorical flourishes and magnificent orchestrations expand a simple Mass Text into a tour de force  baroque composition, never to be rivaled. To hear it with period instruments and a suitably small vocal ensemble is to hear it (unlike most modern performances) as Bach conceived it, an opportunity not to be missed.

Len Torrie, soprano (Montreal)

Myriam Leblanc, soprano (Montreal)

Nicholas Burns, alto (Vancouver)

Philippe Gagné, tenor (Montreal)

Sumner Thomson, bass (Boston)

William Kraushaar,  bass (Montreal)

Boston's critically-acclaimed ensemble BLUE HERON (Scott Metcalfe, Artistic Director) presents an extraordinary program of 15th century Franco-Flemish chansons and the sacred motets and masses that borrow their secular tunes. Divine Songs: Secular Chansons & Sacred Transformations, features music by Binchois, DuFay, Okeghem, Agricola, LaRue and Bauldeweyn, who were among the most celebrated and distinguished composers of the Renaissance.

Scott Metcalfe and his team of extraordinary artists have been leaders in the field in bringing this repertoire to world audiences through their many critically acclaimed recordings, numerous tours and their resident series in Cambridge. This will be a rare opportunity for our region to enjoy a precious repertoire presented by one of the most acclaimed ensembles in the world of early music. Burlington Baroque is delighted to host this event, and to enjoy welcoming back Burlingtonian Scott Metcalfe!

Blue Heron Artists:  

Kim Leeds, Sophie Michaux, Sonja DuToit Tengblad

Corey Dalton Hart, Jason McStoots, Aaron Sheehan 

Sumner Thompson, Paul Guttry, David McFerrin

Scott Metcalfe, harp & fiddle, artistic director

for more detailed information on this program, please visit 

https://www.blueheron.org/concerts/divine-songs/

Among Antonio Vivaldi's extraordinarily prolific body of work, the Concerti for String Ensemble remain some of his most brilliant and treasured works to this day, and assure his position as one of Italy's most renowned composers.  The number of concertos he wrote for string instruments boggles the mind, but we were easily able to select four of our favorites, which highlight the brilliant talents and personalities of L'Harmonie des saisons illustrious and brilliantly virtuoso string band.

Concerto in B minor for 4 Violins

Concerto in A minor for 2 Violins

Concerto in A minor for Recorder & Strings

Concerto in G minor for 2 Cellos

Concerto in D Major for 4 Violins

The two genres which really made George Frideric Handel a rock star in 18th century London were Opera and Oratorio. The Operas, which assured his fame, were staged theatre events on secular and classical themes. The Oratorios, presented in concert without staging, were what occupied Handel during the season of Lent in which the performance of opera was proscribed. He wrote numerous of these large scale works mainly on Biblical subjects from the Hebrew Bible (a notable exception being, of course, MESSIAH.) After that most famous work, ISRAEL in EGYPT was one of the most popular works during his lifetime, presented more or less continually after writing it until his death. The work is extraordinary in that it contains an enormous number of choral movements, with relatively few arias for soloists, making it one of the most challenging and satisfying works for choruses to present, and captivating audiences to this day. It is a monumental pinnacle of the Oratorio genre, which retells the story of Moses leading the Israelites out of captivity in Pharoah's Egypt, including the miracle of salvation at the parting of the Red Sea - the work's climax. A tour de force for both chorus and orchestra, we are delighted to be presenting this performance on the Lane Series in the recital hall at UVM.

with soloists

Myriam Leblanc, soprano (Montreal)

Nicholas Burns, alto (Vancouver)  

Ryan Matos, tenor (Burlington)

Aldeo Jean, tenor (Montreal) 

Sumner Thompson, baritone (Boston)
William Kraushaar, bass (Montreal)

THE BURLINGTON BAROQUE FESTIVAL SINGERS