Les Canards Chantants & Parthenia in concert at Glencairn Museum

Renowned early-music vocal ensemble Les Canards Chantants, Glencairn Museum’s Ensemble in Residence, will perform in the Museum’s Great Hall on Saturday, January 26, at 7:30pm.

Doors open at 7:00. Tickets are $20 General Admission, $15 Basic Members/Seniors/Students, Free for Gold and Patron Members. Advance tickets available through January 24 at the Museum or call 267.502.2990; after January 24, only at the door. Reserved seats for Patron Members only: call 267.502.2990. Glencairn Museum: 1001 Cathedral Road, Bryn Athyn 19009.

The program, “Come Life, Come Death, I Care Not – A Musical Tour of Jacobean London,” is presented in partnership with Parthenia, an ensemble of viola da gamba players. The music is drawn from English Renaissance composer Michael East’s Third Book of Madrigals, first published in 1610, containing sacred anthems, madrigals, Neapolitans, and pastorals for voices and viols, as well as a cycle of eight viol fantasias.

This viol ensemble—known as a “consort”—are artists in residence at The Church of Saint Luke in the Fields in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. The viol, or viola da gamba, is a family of stringed instruments celebrated in European music from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. These bowed and fretted instruments get their name from their playing position “on the leg” (da gamba); they were used at court and in the home primarily during the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Viols feature frets, arched bridges, sloped shoulders, and flat backs, with either six or seven strings. “Consorts” require sets (or “chests”) of viols in three sizes: treble, tenor, and bass, the latter of which can be used for solo playing.

Les Canards Chantants is a solo-voice ensemble committed to dynamic interpretation of renaissance polyphony. Praised for their “polished singing” and for “instilling their superb performances with liveliness and theatricality” (The Boston Musical Intelligencer) and for their “brilliant and moving” programming (Early Music America magazine), the “singing ducks” ensemble has performed to high acclaim in the UK, Germany, and China, and is now based in Philadelphia, where it is musical Ensemble in Residence at Glencairn Museum.