NEWS

On Thursday 15 February 2018 at 7.30pm at St John’s Smith Square, The Studio de Musique Ancienne de Montréal (SMAM), a pillar of the Canadian early music scene (SMAM), brings French Canadian choral music to the UK for the first time. 
 
The programme will shed light on the little known treasures of a cappella early music from New France. SMAM will perform songs in Abenaki, an indigenous language nearing extinction which was taught specially to them by one of its last living speakers. The programme also includes the earliest motets and plainchants composed in French North America and polyphony brought by the first French settlers by sea to the colony, whose only surviving sources are the libraries of historic Québec City.
 
The concerts also includes the European premiere of ‘Ja de longtemps’ by Québec composer Maurice-G. Du Berge. This work is a setting of Marc Lescarbot’s eyewitness accounts of Samuel de Champlain’s exploration of the majestic St. Lawrence River, in search of a trade route to China and celebrates Montréal’s 375th anniversary.

«Back