World & Early Music at Saint James

Our 2023 – 2024 Season

About World & Early Music at Saint James

Originally created as Early Music at Saint James, this concert series was the vision of founder and Director Emerita Kathleen Spencer. Now, years after its first performance in February of 2011, World & Early Music at Saint James is a sought-after venue in the historic performance genre. Each season, concerts of music composed before 1800 are presented in the acoustically rich sanctuary of Saint James Church. The performances of primarily Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque and Classical music are played on faithful reproductions of period instruments. The series offers a venue for small and/or emerging ensembles as well as established artists, presenting a rich repertoire of music not generally available to the Lancaster community. For the 2022 – 2023 Season, programming has expanded to include world music as well.

World & Early Music is a self sustaining concert series that relies on ticket sales, tax-exempt gifts, grants and sponsorships. If you’d like to help support World & Early Music, click here and select World & Early Music from the drop-down menu. You may also include a note in the optional memo field.

Available in person and via livestream

Tickets:
Adult: $25
Student: $10
Cash, check or charge at the door

All concerts are being recorded and will be available to ticket holders after the concert.

Sunday, September 24 | 4 PM

La Bernardinia Baroque Ensemble
and erhu virtuoso, Qin Qian

East and West: Folk and Baroque Music from China

Originally scheduled to be at Saint James in March of 2020, La Bernardinia returns to Saint James on Sunday, September 24th to open our 2023 – 2024 season with East and West: Folk and Baroque Music from China. The program features guest erhu virtuoso, Qian Qin in a program that explores the intersection of East and West through the work of Europeans living and working in China during the eighteenth-century and the cross-cultural bridges they helped to establish.

Concert goers will hear Italian music played on the erhu—a two-stringed bowed instrument whose timbre blends beautifully with the ensemble, and Chinese melodies played by all as the ensemble combines folk and baroque for a very enjoyable program.

    Evan Few, Baroque violin; John Walthausen, harpsichord; Elena Kauffman, viola da gamba

    Sunday, March 10, 2024 | 4 PM

    Filament Baroque

    Bound up in Love

    Alice Teyssier, soprano

    In Bound up in Love, Filament will embark on a new collaboration with Franco-American soprano Alice Teyssier, centering female composers and musicians in a program that interrogates our collective understanding of women in music history and the ways we tell women’s stories through mythology. In this project with Teyssier, who is equally acclaimed in the fields of early and contemporary music, we will use the juxtaposition of different national and compositional styles to cast a fresh light on timeless human issues like grief, longing, and motherhood, creating space to tell ancient stories in a new way. Click here to purchase tickets.

    Eurasia Consort

    Sunday, May 12, 2024 | 4:00 PM

    Eurasia Consort

    Silk Road

    Freiman Stoltzfus

    Eurasia Consort presents music found on the Silk Road in East Asia. Join us on May 12th for a concert by Eurasia Consort followed by a reception in the nearby rectory and a display of Freiman Stoltzfus’s new body of paintings inspired by his recent residency in Japan.

    Eurasia Consort brings to life the ancient music popular during the Tang Dynasty (618 – 907), a time generally regarded as a high point in Chinese civilization when the Silk Road facilitated the exchange of economic, cultural, political and religious ideas.
    The ensemble will perform repertoire from the ancient body of surviving manuscripts, using an array of instruments typically seen in museums including the kugo (Chinese harp), hokyo (a percussion instrument made of Sanukite stone), biwa (short-necked lute), and shakuhachi (bamboo flute). Click here to purchase tickets.

    Sarah Mead, Wendy Gillespie, Julie Jeffrey, Joanna Blendulf, Emily Walhout

    Sunday March 19, 2023; 4 PM | Available online and in person

    Nota Bene, Viol Consort

    Continental Drifters

    In the 16th century, as trade routes opened across the European continent and pushed over mountains and across oceans into Asia and the Americas, the printing press helped to accelerate the dissemination of music. Singers and players traveled with their patrons, taking their native music to distant lands.

    Nota Bene explores these journeys with a range of musical voyages: across the Continent, across the Channel, across the Alps, and further afield, including music that traveled from Portugal to Japanese missions, from France to indigenous villages in Guatemala, from Spain to the great churches of Mexico, and from England to the colonial settlements of North America. Nota Bene performs on a matched set of viols that closely replicate Italian instruments of the 1580’s, with a rich and mellow sound full of detail and sonority.

    Purchase Tickets for Nota Bene