Described by the New York Times as ‘the outstanding early-music ensemble’, Blue Heron is engaged in the exploration of vocal music of the Renaissance and Medieval periods and is now firmly established as the finest choral ensemble of its type in North America. Based in Boston, and led by Scott Metcalfe, Blue Heron offers a home subscription series in Harvard Square, and presents programmes in which original sources are used in the service of persuasive, vivid and exciting concert presentations. Its impressive catalogue of recordings offers a broad conspectus of Renaissance masterpieces, with many derived, in particular, from the great collection of Tudor church music surviving in manuscript in the collections of Peterhouse, Cambridge, and generally known as the ‘Peterhouse Part Books’.

Their concert for Camerata Musica Cambridge draws on this repertory, and offers one of its greatest masterpieces: the anonymous Mass, dating from the last years of Henry VIII’s reign, known as the Missa sine nomine ­–  a work that is the equal, in both beauty and sophistication, of anything by Byrd or Tallis.