Description

The Oriana Consort is a small choral ensemble active in the Cambridge and Boston area.

Our size, of about 30 singers, is optimal for performance of the music on our programs: a cappella works from the mid-15th century through the early 17th, small Baroque works for chorus and continuo, and a cappella works from the mid-19th century through the present. This size is small enough to project the intimate choral sound appropriate for madrigals and motets, yet large enough for period and contemporary works requiring divisi up to SSAATTBB. Usually each of our programs contains music from all of most of these eras, and the resulting musical variety keeps both singers and audiences interested and focused.

Our members have a say and a stake in the selection of our repertory. In choosing programs, we balance music for full choir with solos and small ensembles, which offers opportunities for the many soloists in our membership and lends further variety to our performances. We never engage vocal soloists from outside the group, but we do engage excellent instrumentalists from Boston's early music community to accompany the Baroque works that we perform.

Our name is a little curious: we're not really a consort; we're a chorale. But a long-ago predecessor of this group was an 8-member instrumental and vocal consort, and the term stuck. We take our name from The Triumphes of Oriana, a collection of twenty-three English madrigals of which Thomas Morley was the editor, to which he contributed several of his own pieces, and which he published in 1601. The name in the title may have been a secret reference to Queen Elizabeth I of England, and this collection may have been intended as a gesture of homage to her. (Every now and then we perform several madrigals from this collection.)