The Boston Early Music Festival Chamber Ensemble was established in October 2008 and delighted the public a month later at the début production of the Boston Early Music Festival Chamber Opera Series: John Blow’s Venus and Adonis and Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Actéon.
The BEMF Chamber Ensemble is a unique and intimate subset of the BEMF Orchestra, and its creation was inspired not only by the smaller instrumental forces required for BEMF’s annual Chamber Opera Series productions, but also by invitations from numerous colleague organizations.
The BEMF Chamber Ensemble’s third CD on the cpo label, the Charpentier opera double bill of La Descente d’Orphée aux Enfers and La Couronne de Fleurs, won the Grammy Award in 2015 for Best Opera Recording. The ensemble is led by one or both of BEMF’s Artistic Directors, Paul O’Dette and Stephen Stubbs, or by BEMF’s Orchestra Director Robert Mealy, and features the best Baroque instrumentalists from around the world.