Burlington Baroque Festival 2026

 
Burlington Baroque announces the Third Annual Burlington Baroque Festival to be held Thursday, September 17, through Sunday, September 20, 2026. Festival Artists-in-Residence Ensemble L’Harmonie des saisons and the Burlington Baroque Festival Singers, under the direction of Eric Milnes, will be joined by Boston's ensemble Blue Heron.  We also invite you to pre-concert presentations on Friday and Sunday.

• Thursday, Friday, and Saturday evening performances will be at College Street Congregational Church, 265 College Street, Burlington, Vermont.
• Saturday afternoon's Blue Heron Performance will be at The Cathedral Church of St. Paul, 2 Cherry Street, Burlington. 
• Sunday's performance will be co-presented with the Lane Series at the UVM Recital Hall, 392 South Prospect Street, Burlington, Vermont.

Ticket information:  
Festival Passes - $140-285 - the Festival Pass gives you access to all Festival performances at College Street Church and The Cathedral Church of St. Paul.  Tickets to Sunday's performance of Handel's Israel in Egypt will be sold separately.

Individual Tickets:
*Performances at College Street Church - $80, $70, $60, $40, $10 for students, and free for children under 18.
*Performances at the Cathedral - $80, $60, $40, $10 for students, and free for children under 18.
*Handel's Israel in Egypt at the UVM Recital Hall - $55 for adults, $15 for students

Merchandise: Burlington Baroque Festival t-shirts, hats & tote bags will be available for purchase at the performances.

Donations to Burlington Baroque:
Your donation helps to ensure the availability of high-quality early music in the Burlington area.  You may add a donation to your ticket purchase, donate online via our website, or mail a check to PO Box 53, Burlington, VT. 05402.  Burlington Baroque is a 501c3 nonprofit organization. Thank you for your support!

Festival Performances:
Thursday, September 17, 7:30 p.m.  Music, Drama & Dance in the Kingdom of France

Montreal's Baroque Orchestra L'Harmonie des saisons and the Burlington Baroque Festival Singers open the 2026 Festival in FESTIVE Style, featuring four of 18th-century France's greatest composers,  among the most celebrated within a pantheon of great composers serving Louis XIV and Louis XV during France's Golden Age. A One-Act Opera, a Grand Motet, an expansive Dance Suite, and a brilliant operatic Chaconne assure an exquisite evening of music!

Jean-Féry Rebel: The Character of the Dances
Marc-Antoine Charpentier: The Pleasures of Versailles (One-Act Opera)
Jean Baptiste Lully: Chaconne from Armide
Sebastian Brossard: Grand Motet: In convertendo dominus.

Featured soloists are:
Myriam Leblanc, soprano (Montreal)
Len Torrie, soprano (Montreal)
Nicholas Burns, alto (Vancouver)
Philippe Gagné, tenor (Quebec City)
Ryan Matos, tenor (Burlington)
Sumner Thomson, baritone (Boston)
William Kraushaar,  bass (Montreal)

With the BURLINGTON BAROQUE FESTIVAL SINGERS

Friday, September 18, 7:30 p.m. BACH: The Mass in B minor
*Pre-concert panel at 6:30 p.m. - Baroque Artists and their Instruments
Our artists-in-residence showcase their baroque instruments.

Johann Sebastian Bach assembled the monumental B minor Mass in the last years of his life, a compendium of some of his greatest works from across the length of his storied career. He viewed it as a summation of his life's work in sacred music, and had it bound in a volume that would lay ignored for decades. Without question, one of the greatest masterworks in all of Western Music, the variety of styles, rhetorical flourishes, and magnificent orchestrations expand a simple Mass Text into a tour de force baroque composition, never to be rivaled. To hear it with period instruments and a suitably small vocal ensemble is to hear it (unlike most modern performances) as Bach conceived it, an opportunity not to be missed.

Featured soloists are:
Len Torrie, soprano (Montreal)
Myriam Leblanc, soprano (Montreal)
Nicholas Burns, alto (Vancouver)
Philippe Gagné, tenor (Montreal)
Sumner Thomson, bass (Boston)
William Kraushaar,  bass (Montreal)

Saturday, September 19, 2:00 p.m.  DIVINE SONGS featuring Boston's BLUE HERON
*At The Cathedral Church of St. Paul
For this performance, we will offer SNAP tickets for purchase at the door

Boston's critically-acclaimed ensemble BLUE HERON (Scott Metcalfe, Artistic Director) presents an extraordinary program of 15th-century Franco-Flemish chansons and the sacred motets and masses that borrow their secular tunes. Divine Songs: Secular Chansons & Sacred Transformations, features music by Binchois, DuFay, Ockeghem, Agricola, LaRue, and Bauldeweyn, who were among the most celebrated and distinguished composers of the Renaissance.

Scott Metcalfe and his team of extraordinary artists have been leaders in the field in bringing this repertoire to world audiences through their many critically acclaimed recordings, numerous tours, and their resident series in Cambridge. This will be a rare opportunity for our region to enjoy a precious repertoire presented by one of the most acclaimed ensembles in the world of early music. Burlington Baroque is delighted to host this event and to welcome back Burlingtonian Scott Metcalfe!

Blue Heron Artists:  
Kim Leeds, Sophie Michaux, Sonja DuToit Tengblad
Corey Dalton Hart, Jason McStoots, Aaron Sheehan
Sumner Thompson, Paul Guttry, David McFerrin
Scott Metcalfe, harp & fiddle, Artistic Director

For more detailed information on this program, please visit https://www.blueheron.org/concerts/divine-songs/
                                   

Saturday, September 19, 7:30 p.m.  VIVA VIVALDI: Concerti Stravaganza!

Among Antonio Vivaldi's extraordinarily prolific body of work, the Concerti for String Ensemble remain some of his most brilliant and treasured works to this day, and assure his position as one of Italy's most renowned composers.  The number of concertos he wrote for string instruments boggles the mind, but we were easily able to select some of our favorites, which highlight the brilliant talents and personalities of L'Harmonie des saisons' illustrious and brilliantly virtuoso string band.

Concerto in B minor for 4 Violins
Concerto in A minor for 2 Violins
Concerto in A minor for Recorder & Strings
Concerto in G minor for 2 Cellos
Concerto in D Major for 4 Violins

Sunday, September 20, 2:00 p.m. Handel's Grand Oratorio: Israel in Egypt
*Pre-concert talk with Benjamin Pomerance at 1:15 p.m.
Co-Presented with the Lane Series at the UVM Recital Hall

The two genres that really made George Frideric Handel a rock star in 18th-century London were Opera and Oratorio. The Operas, which assured his fame, were staged theatre events on secular and classical themes. The Oratorios, presented in concert without staging, were what occupied Handel during the season of Lent, in which the performance of opera was proscribed. He wrote numerous large-scale works mainly on Biblical subjects from the Hebrew Bible (a notable exception being, of course, MESSIAH). After that most famous work, ISRAEL in EGYPT was one of the most popular works during his lifetime, presented more or less continually after writing it until his death. The work is extraordinary in that it contains an enormous number of choral movements, with relatively few arias for soloists, making it one of the most challenging and satisfying works for choruses to present, and captivating audiences to this day. It is a monumental pinnacle of the Oratorio genre, which retells the story of Moses leading the Israelites out of captivity in Pharaoh's Egypt, including the miracle of salvation at the parting of the Red Sea - the work's climax. A tour de force for both chorus and orchestra, we are delighted to be co-presenting this performance with the Lane Series.

Featured soloists are:
Myriam Leblanc, soprano (Montreal)
Nicholas Burns, alto (Vancouver)  
Ryan Matos, tenor (Burlington)
Aldeo Jean, tenor (Montreal)
Sumner Thompson, baritone (Boston)
William Kraushaar, bass (Montreal)

with the BURLINGTON BAROQUE FESTIVAL SINGERS

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*The Burlington Baroque Festival is a grateful recipient of a grant from the Concert Artists Fund of the Vermont Community Foundation.