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Home  >  Press Centre  >  Media Releases

2025-2026 Season Media Releases

Early Music Vancouver’s LUMEN Festival Returns with Ruckus Early Music and Ronald Brautigam for a Weekend of Intimate and Illuminating Concerts

February 3, 2026

Handel’s Messiah Unites Three of Vancouver’s Premier Music Organizations This December

November 6, 2025

2024-2025 Season Media Releases



Early Music Vancouver Announces Winners of third-Annual Emerging Artist Competition

June 13, 2025 

Early Music Vancouver’s 2025 Summer Festival BACH & MOZART: In Endless Ascent A journey through hidden landscapes and inner worlds

June 9, 2025

Early Music Vancouver presents the cultural revolution of Early Modern music with Quicksilver Baroque Ensemble

February 25, 2025

Early Music Vancouver and The Vancouver Chopin Society present pianist Dmitry Ablogin in concert

February 20, 2025

Early Music Vancouver Celebrates the Season of Love Through Song with Bach Ties the Knot

January 8, 2025

Early Music Vancouver Celebrates Master Storyteller Benjamin Bagby’s Return in Performance of Medieval Epic Gregorius

December 17, 2024

Early Music Vancouver presents Iestyn Davies and Fretwork chamber group in reflective concert Lamento

October 22, 2024

Early Music Vancouver Launches Electrifying 2024/25 Concert Season with New Arrangement of Bach’s Goldberg Variations

August 14, 2024

2023-2024 Season Media Releases

Early Music Vancouver Announces 2024 Summer Festival BACH UNTAMED

June 20, 2024

Early Music Vancouver Announces 2024 Emerging Artist Competition

April 2, 2024

Early Music Vancouver Announces the Digital Premiere of The Queen of Carthage

November 8, 2023

Early Music Vancouver & Vancouver Chamber Choir Brighten Holiday Season with Christmas Classic, Handel’s Messiah

November 1, 2023

Early Music Vancouver Announces 2023-2024 Main Season, LUMINESCENCE

July 19, 2023

2022-2023 Season Media Releases

Early Music Vancouver Announces Winners of Emerging Early Music Artist Competition

June 1, 2023

Early Music Vancouver Announces Emerging Early Music Artist Competition May 1-15

April 11, 2023

Early Music Vancouver Announces Annual Summer Festival in Celebration of Women in Music

March 8, 2023

Banish the Winter Blahs with Concerts by Early Music Vancouver

January 12, 2023

Early Music Vancouver Presents Medieval Ensemble Diabolus in Musica

October 11, 2022

Early Music Vancouver Announces Fall Live & Digital Concerts

September 6, 2022

Early Music Vancouver Announces 2022-23 Concert Season

July 19, 2022

2021-2022 Season Media Releases

May 17, 2022

Early Music Vancouver Vancouver Presents 2022 Bach Festival July 26 to August 6

April 27, 2022

Early Music Vancouver Presents Persian Setar Masters in Two Concerts This June

April 6, 2022

Early Music Vancouver Celebrates the ‘Merrie Month of May’ with Plaisirs du Louvre

March 23, 2022

Early Music Vancouver’s April Concerts Packed with International Stars

Feb 16, 2022

Early Music Vancouver Presents Live Concert In Celebration of International Women’s Day

Dec 2, 2021

EMV Announces 2022 Winter and Spring Season

November 11, 2021

Constantinople & A Filetta present Clair-Obscur: sacred and secular songs from the rich Corsican musical tradition

Sept 23, 2021
Illustrious Keyboardist Andreas Staier Inaugurates EMV’s New Graf Forte Piano with Mozart, Haydn & Schubert

Sept 1, 2021
Early Music Vancouver Reveals First Half of its 52nd Concert Season

2020-21 Season Media Releases

July 13, 2021
Early Music Vancouver Concerts Now Free for All Indigenous Peoples

July 8, 2021
Early Music Vancouver Presents 2021 Vancouver Bach Festival

June 8, 2021
Early Music Vancouver Hosts Panel Discussion on Indigeneity in the Arts

May 12, 2021
Early Music Vancouver Appoints Baritone Jonathon Adams as First-Ever Summer Artist-In-Residence

December 21, 2020
EMV Announces 11 New Concerts for the Remainder of its 51st Season

December 7, 2020
Lauded Canadian Soprano and Early Music Specialist Suzie LeBlanc Appointed EMV Artistic & Executive Director

September 16, 2020
EMV Launches Free Digital Concert Hall, Showcasing More Than 20 Original Recordings of Period Performances

2019-20 Season & Earlier Media Releases

July 7, 2020
EMV Announces Departure of Matthew White, Executive & Artistic Director

March 3, 2020
Record-Breaking EMV Season Culminates in 50th Anniversary Gala & Celebration of Beethoven’s 250th Birthday

February 24, 2020
EMV and Vancouver Chopin Society present Pianist Tomasz Ritter in Recital

January 23, 2020
All Aboard! EMV Presents Sea Songs & Shanties with Vancouver’s Chor Leoni Men’s Choir and Montreal’s Ensemble La Nef

January 8, 2020
Orlando Consort Gives Voice to Silent Film, La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc

December 12, 2019
EMV Presents Two Nights of Medieval Concerts: Benjamin Bagby Brings Beowulf: The Epic in Performance to Vancouver Playhouse on January 10; Sequentia Performs Charms, Riddles and Elegies on January 10

November 28, 2019
EMV Celebrates the Holidays with Festive Cantatas: Christmas in Gabrieli’s Venice

October 24, 2019
Holiday Masterpiece Handel’s Messiah Returns Following the Success of EMV’s 2017  Sold-Out Run

August 29, 2019
EMV Launches 50th Anniversary Season with Visionary Jeanne Lamon in – Le Concert Spirituel: Baroque Orchestral Suites –

July 11, 2019
EMV Presents Henry Purcell’s Ode to Music’s Patron Saint – Hail Bright Cecilia –

July 4, 2019
Vancouver Bach Festival Launches with Masterful Two-Night Performance of Complete Brandenburg Concertos

June 27, 2019
Vancouver Bach Festival Celebrates EMV’s 50th Anniversary with Stellar Lineup of World-Class Artists

April 15, 2019
EMV Announces Celebratory 50th Anniversary Season

March 14, 2019
EMV Presents Pacific Baroque Orchestra, Vancouver Cantata Singers, and Internationally Renowned Soloists in – Handel Coronation Anthems – 

January 9, 2019
EMV Presents Globally Celebrated Vocal Ensemble The King’s Singers with – Royal Blood: Music for Henry VIII –

December 18, 2018
EMV and VSO Present New York Polyphony as part of the Annual New Music Festival

November 6, 2018
EMV Presents Bach Collegium Japan and Star Soprano Joanne Lunn in Captivating Concert of Baroque Masterworks with Bach, Handel and Vivaldi

August 30, 2018
Early Music Vancouver Opens 49th Season with Antonio Vivaldi’s Virtuosic Collection of Concertos – L’Estro Armonico

July 12, 2018
EMV Presents J.S Bach’s Masterpieces at the Chan Centre – Cantata 146 (Wir müssen durch viel Trübsal) & Cantata 198 (Trauer Ode)  

April 5, 2018
EMV Finishes 2017-18 Season with Canadian Soprano Karina Gauvin in Programme of Virtuosic Opera Arias from 18th Century St. Petersburg

March 22, 2018
EMV Presents World’s Premiere Vocal Ensemble Specializing in Renaissance Polyphony

March 8, 2018
Early Music Vancouver Reveals Illuminating Vancouver Bach Festival and 2018/19 Main Season

January 31, 2018
Early Music Vancouver Presents Canadian Superstar Angela Hewitt in Virtuoso Piano Performance of J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations

November 23, 2017
Early Music Vancouver Brings Holiday Warmth with Beloved Annual Festive Cantatas: Vivaldi’s Gloria and Magnificat

October 25, 2017
Early Music Vancouver Brings New Life to Holiday Tradition of Handel’s Messiah

September 21, 2017
Early Music Vancouver Presents History’s First Great Opera – Monteverdi’s Orfeo

July 11, 2017
Early Music Vancouver Presents J.S. Bach’s St. John Passion 

June 27, 2017
Vancouver Bach Festival Returns and Grows with Dazzling Lineup of World-Class Artists

March 27,2017
Early Music Vancouver Announces 2017/18 Season and Summer Bach Festival

February 23, 2017
Early Music Vancouver Presents the Celestial Sounds and Angelic Voices of Globally Celebrated Choir of King’s College, Cambridge

January 5, 2017
Early Music Vancouver Explores Extraordinary Figure of Cultural and Racial History in – Le Mozart Noir – 

November 15, 2016
Early Music Vancouver Heralds the Holidays with Joyous Baroque Celebration – Festive Cantatas: J.S. Bach Magnificat –

August 10, 2016
Early Music Vancouver Starts Season on a High Note with – Handel and His Rivals –

June 28, 2016
Early Music Vancouver Presents Bach’s Crowning Masterpiece – Mass in B Minor – 

June 21, 2016
Early Music Vancouver Announces First-Ever Vancouver Bach Festival

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Een Romantische Johannes Passion

Historical Performance has been steadily looking toward the nineteenth-century as a source of inspiration, and Orchestra Lagrandt wants to lead the charge into Romantic orchestral performance practice. As an orchestra of ambitious musicians in their twenties from 25 different nations, we aspire to represent the voice of the new generation in Historical Performance.

Een Romantische Johannes Passion is an ongoing project to reimagine the Johannes Passion of J. S. Bach in a late nineteenth century style. The first Passion revivals in the Netherlands took place in Rotterdam in 1870, featuring large symphonic orchestrations, and a radically different musical language than that of the HP and modern classical worlds. In our initial performance with the Tangram Chamber Choir, we pushed the boundaries of what Romantic Bach might have sounded like: exploring changes in orchestration, stoic tempi, rubato, phrasing, nineteenth- century bowing practices, and even portamento. We plan to establish this project as an annual tradition every Easter season, reworking the arrangement each time in the spirit of Romantic spontaneity.


One of the wonderful things about the Historical Performance movement is that we are able to use forgotten practices, this time hailing from the nineteenth century, to present such a beloved and well known-work in a new light.

The world is familiar with stories of clever forgers whose life’s mission is to cunningly reproduce the light and shadows of historical masterworks, from Vermeer’s brushstrokes to Da Vinci’s proportional precision… but what if these crimes of craftsmanship were to extend beyond the visual arts? What if the pieces we know to be by Palestrina, Monteverdi or even Johann Sebastian Bach were in fact stylistic copies, artfully composed by a secret circle of music forgers and passed off as the work of the greats? What if those music forgers are at work as we speak? 

This premise inspires our original program The Music Forgery Workshop. Our early music comedy imagines the lives of such a circle of musical criminals, offering a fresh and lively presentation of historical compositions, not as museum artifacts but as living works in progress. The workshop itself is set up on the stage and its members carry forth the plot in music and words. A narrator in the role of a suspicious inspector lends the performance a theatrical flow. The listener is invited into a satire on high society’s art commerce, while the performers make fun of themselves for having devoted their lives to the niche subject of historical music performance. 

Violinist Elizabeth Sommers combines her skills and experience in traditional music with expertise in the performance and improvisation of medieval and Renaissance repertoires. Multi-instrumentalist Eliot X. Dios (keyboards, bagpipes and flutes) works wholeheartedly to employ storytelling techniques developed through the history of literature and cinema in his early music concerts. Composer Gunnar Haraldsson (violin, guitar) seeks to translate the forms and intentions of early composition for a modern audience. Halldór B. Arnarson (keyboards, voice) has devoted his career to bringing musical craftsmanship from the era of counterpoint to the attention of the public and comedy to the early music scene. Singer and storyteller Ásta S. Arnardóttir brings the storyline to the public with personal immediacy, and through her character work defines the different veins of the show, sometimes hilarious and sometimes serious. 

The story is narrated by the character of the Inspector, acted out by the members of the MFW, and told in rhyming Icelandic verse in one musical pillar of the show, a madrigal composed by our very own 

Halldór in the style of Monteverdi. The show has an entertaining educational dimension. The audience is exposed to a broad sweep of historical and musical information in a condensed form, necessary to understand the musical humour, while dramatic rhythm and scenographic effects prevent overwhelm. We also place particular emphasis on theatrical illusion and synchronisation. One example appears in the opening scene, in which the inspector is seen watching television. On stage, this becomes a complex exercise in coordination: each time the inspector presses a button on the remote control, the musicians instantly switch pieces, creating the impression of rapidly changing television channels. 

This opening scene establishes the tone of the entire show, comical and satirical in its storytelling and diverse in its musical language. It not only introduces the wide range of musical styles that appear throughout the performance, but also functions as the plot’s inciting incident, as the inspector hears a news report about the discovery of a previously unknown concerto by Vivaldi. 

Another important scene takes place when one forger is alone on stage in low light, perusing books on medieval music, while the musicians perform and sing offstage, sounding his audiation as he reads. This intimate moment evokes the sleepless nights spent studying facsimiles and learning historical compositional techniques, by which the forger acquires the inspiration and the expertise necessary to his art, and reveals a hidden side of musical performance: the immense amount of study and preparation that precedes the moment on stage. This setting also creates space for visual and musical comedy, as seen in the trailer video, where a 14th-century melody is played backwards because Halldór is unknowingly reading the facsimile upside-down, only realising the mistake when the music begins to sound absurd. 

Fun and friendship are at the heart of the whole project, though the link between music and crime is an important historical consideration. Classical music was often used as the demonstration of a monarch’s power, music teaching as a cover up for secret affairs, and pieces were published under another’s name for profit. Such examples of “inappropriate practices” carry an exciting and attractive element for the audience which the MFW seeks to exploit. Under this light-hearted surface lies a more serious layer of questions concerning our present-day existence, such as excessive materialism in high society and the threat posed on human craftsmanship and skill by the rise of artificial intelligence. 

Please Note:

The main applicant and creative/intellectual driver of the project must be 30 or under (on May 15th).

The average age of all musicians must not be older than 32, and the maximum age of supporting musicians must be no more than 35 (on May 15th.)