Concordia Consort Performs In Malden

Concordia Consort (Eileen Cecelia Callahan, soprano; with Sheila Beardslee, director; Nouri Newman, Michael Shonle and Brian Warnock, recorders) presents a contemplative concert of penitential chorales and psalms for the Lenten season paired with powerful instrumental works in a house concert at the Meyer residence, 521 Fellsway East in Malden.
Suggested donation for this concert is $15, $10 for students, seniors and early music society members. For seating requests and directions, please visit Concordia’s web page.

The program Teares of a Sorrowful Soule features music that is intense, harmonically biting and bittersweet in tone for this penitential season. Among the beautiful German chorale tunes included are Vater unser im Himmelreich, Durch Adams Fall and O Lamm Gottes unschuldig in simple hymn-like settings and transcriptions of complex organ chorale preludes. Included in the psalm settings are Hassler’s deeply chromatic Ad Dominum tribularer, Alessandro Scarlatti’s passionate Ad te Dominum levavi animam meam and Byrd’s heartfelt Miserere mei.

In addition to these psalms and chorales, the Consort is featured in complex fantasias by Bull and Cato and gentle psalm settings by Morley and Lasso.

Founded in 1995, Concordia Consort is the performing ensemble of Recorders/Early Music MetroWest, the metroWest’s participatory early music program. For over two decades, Concordia has contributed period music for churches throughout New England, heard in live broadcast on WCRB, WHRB and WGBH Radio, and performed concerts in historic King’s Chapel and St. Paul’s Cathedral in downtown Boston, at Middlesex Community College, MIT Chapel and Williams College, for the Concord Museum, and other venues.

Concordia Consort was featured in The Boston Boy Choir’s holiday concerts; in two concerts during the Museum of Science’s acclaimed Leonardo da Vinci exhibit, and for First Night performances in Boston and Portsmouth NH. Concordia’s director, Sheila Beardslee, has also led 11 performance/study tours to Italy for amateur musicians, performing in Rome, Florence, Siena, Orvieto, Bolzano, Venice, Padua, Milan, Genoa and other cities.

Named Ensemble-in-Residence at Trinity Episcopal Church in Concord, Concordia Consort frequently performs there on Sundays with the Parish Choir and in concerts during the year. Concordia has collaborated with Portsmouth (NH)-based Pavane Renaissance Dance Ensemble for a survey of Elizabethan music, dance and poetry, and often joins forces with members of Ars & Amici vocal ensemble. Guest soloists have included sopranos Eileen Cecelia Callahan and Harriet Bridges, countertenor Andrei Caracoti, and lutenist Douglas Freundlich. Concordia recorded Ay me, Ohime!, released on CD in 2009.