Scott Metcalfe

Ensemble director and instrumentalist Scott Metcalfe is one of North America's top authorities on music from the 15th through the 17th centuries. He has been the director of the Boston-based Renaissance ensemble Blue Heron since 1999 and has led that group in performances and recordings that combine innovative presentation and scholarly erudition. He has led several other ensembles as music director, and as a Baroque violinist, he has performed with leading early music ensembles, including Toronto's Tafelmusik, in both the U.S. and Canada. He also plays the medieval fiddle and the Baroque harp. Metcalfe has recorded with various ensembles of which he has been a member, and in the late 2010s with Blue Heron, he began a series of albums devoted to the secular music of Johannes Ockeghem. That series reached its second volume in 2024. Metcalfe was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on May 24, 1963. As an undergraduate, he attended Brown University, majoring in biology, and, he notes, "Perhaps uniquely in the early music world, he is the lead author of an article published in the Annals of Botany." He also plays the Baroque violin, and in 1987, he joined the Toronto early music ensemble Tafelmusik, remaining there until 1998. He was also a co-founder of the ensembles La Luna and King's Noyse, and from 1989 to 2003, he was an annual member of the Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra. Metcalfe also played with other groups, and in 1993, he made his recording debut with the Boston Camerata on the Erato label in a performance of the Requiem of Jean Gilles. He and two other musicians founded Blue Heron in 1999, and the ensemble has grown into a major force on the Boston early music scene, with flexible formations. The new century saw Metcalfe continue to pursue a varied range of activities as a performer, ensemble director, educator, and musicologist. He played important roles in the vibrant early music scenes of Montreal, Quebec (performing with the group L'Harmonie des Saisons) and Cleveland, Ohio (where he directed the Baroque orchestra at Oberlin University. Metcalfe has made guest conducting appearances with many groups, including Quire in Cleveland, Pacific Baroque in Vancouver, British Columbia, and TENET in New York. From 2010 to 2019, he was music director of the Green Mountain Project in New York. Metcalfe has edited materials from two little-known Renaissance manuscripts, the Leuven Chansonnier in Belgium and the Peterhouse Partbooks in England. With Blue Heron, he has performed some of the music he has edited, and he is the author of several musicological articles on Renaissance music. Metcalfe has appeared on some 35 albums, many of them with Blue Heron, and many, such as the Ockeghem releases (on Vol. 2, in 2024, he also played the Baroque harp) on Blue Heron's own label, devoted to little-known Renaissance repertory. He has taught choral repertoire and performance practice at Boston University. ~ James Manheim, Rovi