Boston-based ensemble Seven Times Salt opened their 20th concert season earlier this month. To celebrate two decades of making music, the 2022-23 season spans familiar favorites to brand new programming.
The group has long delighted in blurring the lines between “art music” and folk music, and “The Thirsty Scholar” on October 2 put this skill to good use in a new program of traditional Neapolitan tunes alongside works by Stefani, Tomboncino, Dowland, Cara and others. The musicians read aloud selections by local poet and friend Scott Harney, who passed away in 2019. This program will also take place on March 5 at the Italian bookstore I AM Books in Boston’s North End.
November brings the delightfully spooky “The Corners of the Moon” featuring uncanny music for the season of All Souls. STS journeys to the Pioneer Valley to join forces with colleagues In Stile Moderno, based in Greenfield, MA. This unearthly program includes ghost encounters, witches’ dances, eerie masquing tunes by Campion and Johnson, lunar works by Picforth and Lawes, tales of fairy mayhem, and a 17th-century trip to the Moon. Concerts take place November 5 in Amherst, MA and November 6 in Cambridge, MA.
Perhaps their most beloved event over the years, the group’s annual Winter Solstice Celebration will be offered three times: December 4 on Boston’s North Shore in Beverly, MA, and twice on December 20 in Watertown, MA (matinee and evening concerts). The program features a festive helping of wassailing songs, rugged shapenote hymns, French Baroque noels, Spanish villancicos, Irish reels, STS originals, and surprise guests!
The October and December programs will be available to watch on YouTube for free, with spring videos also in the works.
This winter, the group reprises “A Brave Barrel of Oysters” with music around Samuel Pepys. The diaries he kept from 1660-1668 provide a fascinating glimpse of life in London during the reign of the “merry monarch” Charles II. An enthusiastic amateur musician, Pepys chronicled his experiences with the best (and the worst) musicians in town. STS brings his bustling, bewigged, and bawdy London to life with readings from the diaries along with music by his friends: Hume, Blagrave, Young, Locke, and others. February 26 in Marblehead, MA and February 27 in Watertown, MA.
Rounding out the season is “Courtiers & Costermongers,” a musical tour of 17th-century London’s taverns, markets and well-appointed homes. Focusing on music for the consort-of-six, the program includes virtuosic settings from Thomas Morley’s First Booke of Consort Lessons, country dance tunes, and broadside ballads about epic battles, musicians making trouble, and that most perennial of all subjects…beer. Join us for a 20th birthday party after the show on May 6 in Watertown, MA.
An audience member recently commented, “It was one of the most skillfully constructed programs I’ve been to…performed with verve, skill, and manifest affection.” Join us! We can’t wait to see you in person or online. Learn more about our guest artists, programs, videos, venues, and tickets at www.seventimessalt.com.
