Singer

This Christmas concert transports the listener back to the Middle Ages, highlighting some of the most beautiful and rarely heard repertoire from the medieval holiday season. With the earliest surviving polyphonic mass compilation, Missa Tournai, as the concert’s centerpiece, Concordian Dawn offers a true holiday commemoration through medieval liturgy and carols.

EPSG:4326

Midtown Concerts presents Concordian Dawn

St. Malachy Roman Catholic Church - The Actors' Chapel

“Almost everything we might wish to know about the sound of medieval music is lost to us,” warns Daniel Leech-Wilkinson. Through the double medium of discursive speculation and live performance, Sarah Kay and Concordian Dawn set out in this lecture-performance not to know medieval song – we agree that is not possible – but to relive some of its affective realities, which we locate not in the objective worlds of time, place, or historical circumstance, but in dynamic interactions between body and world inflected by imagination. The sounds of this song are conjured not just by birds and fountains, but by celestial beasts and alluring sirens. Some of these sung texts represent the singing subject captivated by beauty, others struggling between life and death, others at the limits of a dream world, or ecstatic with joy.

Medieval Song and the Sounding of World, Body, and Imagination

Princeton University

If you’ve never heard a performance like this, you’re in for a treat! Mercury audiences look forward to this every year – join us and get closer to the genius of baroque masters like Bach, Vivaldi, and Handel as we perform their music on historical instruments – instruments that more authentically capture the kinds of sounds the composers had in their heads when they wrote this music (rather than the quite different-sounding modern instruments they’re usually performed on).

David Dickey

Countertenor

Events

Upcoming events

Jan 11, 2025

Vivaldi, Handel, & Bach · Mercury Chamber Orchestra

Past events

Dec 21, 2023

Midtown Concerts presents Concordian Dawn · Gotham Early Music Scene

Sep 28, 2023

Medieval Song and the Sounding of World, Body, and Imagination · Princeton University Music Department

About

David Dickey hasn't added a bio