Press & Reviews
I can’t believe our 36th season is over! It seems like only yesterday that I arrived in Chicago, even though the calendar tells me more than a year has gone by! During this time, The Newberry Consort presented four major programs: Madama Europa in the Gonzaga Court, featuring lush Italian music from sixteenth-century Mantua; an encore of A Mexican Christmas, guest directed by Artistic Director Emerita Ellen Hargis; Oracles, Prophets, and Dreams, with music by Orlande de Lassus and other composers; and Singen und Sagen: Music for Hope in a Time of War, a spectacular and heartfelt collaboration with the amazing vocalists of Bella Voce.
“Liza Malamut is taking the Newberry Consort places in her first year as artistic director. Literally and figuratively.
Saturday night’s performance at St. Chrysostom’s Episcopal Church in the Gold Coast saw another new venue this season for Chicago’s most enduring early music ensemble. But the intelligence, ambition, and polish Malamut has brought to the organization are even more impressive and welcome than the changes of scenery. ”
“Saturday night’s concert at the University of Chicago’s Bond Chapel showed that not a stitch had been dropped in the transition and the reins have been handed off successfully to new artistic director Liza Malamut, who curated a program that embodied the Consort’s tradition of probing scholarship and refined performance.
“Oracles, Prophets, and Dreams,” as the evening was billed, centered on the Sibylline Prophecies of Orlando de Lassus, and offered a rare opportunity to hear this complete work in live performance. While the score’s origin and inspiration are a matter of scholarly dispute, its musical interest is unambiguous. ”
“The Newberry Consort opened its 2022–23 Hyde Park season Saturday night, Oct. 29 with a glorious concert at Congregation Rodfei Zedek, 5200 S. Hyde Park Blvd., celebrating the life of Madama Europa, a singer at the Gonzaga Court. Known also as Madama Europa di Rossi, she was the sister of composer Salamone Rossi (ca. 1570–1630) and the first woman to be considered a great Jewish opera star. ”
“In its first concert with Liza Malamut at the helm, the Newberry Consort showed that it remains in good hands.
Taking over for Ellen Hargis and David Douglass, who have led the Newberry Consort since 2009, Malamut is a trombonist, researcher, and educator whose research specialty is in Jewish music in early modern Italy. Aptly, this first program in her first season as artistic director centers on the life of Jewish court singer Madama Europa di Rossi.”
“Roosevelt University’s Chicago College of Performing Arts (CCPA) is pleased to announce its partnership with The Newberry Consort as an Ensemble-in-Residence. This partnership will bring The Newberry Consort into CCPA on a regular basis, sharing their rehearsals and performances with students to provide experienced professional members’ presence throughout their residences….”
After the departure of longtime artistic directors Ellen Hargis and David Douglass last season, The Newberry Consort is pleased to announce its 36th season under the new leadership of Artistic Director Liza Malamut. The season will be filled with programs that range from music centered around the Jewish Italian singer Madama Europa in early modern Mantua to music related to the theme of oracles, prophecies, and dreams to lush, polychoral music from Germany. Ellen Hargis will also return to guest-direct the beloved “A Mexican Christmas.”…
The Newberry Consort has announced its thirty-sixth season under the new leadership of artistic director Liza Malamut after the departure of longtime artistic directors Ellen Hargis and David Douglass last season. A historical trombonist and scholar, Malamut has performed around the world with early music groups including Tafelmusik, Opera Atelier, the Handel & Haydn Society, Piffaro: The Renaissance Band and Dark Horse Consort. She is also one of the founding members of Incantare, an ensemble of violins and sackbuts formed to highlight music of lesser-known and marginalized composers and their contemporaries in early modern Europe.…
A local husband-and-wife team that led one of the country’s foremost early music ensembles has called it a career, having earned a lifetime achievement award for their work preserving and performing centuries-old art.
Rogers Park residents Ellen Hargis and David Douglass retired in the spring from their roles as co-artistic directors of The Newberry Consort, an ensemble that performs and records music from roughly the Medieval to Renaissance periods…
"There was anticipation in the air Saturday night at International House here in Hyde Park as a substantial audience formed to hear the Newberry Consort. There was also a warm and sunny feeling among the crowd. They had gathered knowing that this would be the last Hyde Park concert for David Douglass and Ellen Hargis as co-directors of the group…"
"It wasn’t always fun and games for the Newberry Consort over the past 35 years as Chicago’s pioneering ensemble for historically informed performance braved various crises to build a local following for early music. But “The Newbs” not only survived but flourished. And with longtime members David Douglass and his wife, Ellen Hargis leading it onward and decidedly upward as co-artistic directors over the last 15 years, it remains a model for every other specialized group of its kind…”
"After leading the Newberry Consort together for almost 13 years, Douglass and Hargis are stepping down from leadership of the early music ensemble. Under Hargis and Douglass’s leadership, the Newberry Consort blossomed into a deeply rooted in a core band of Chicago-based ‘HIPsters.’ That local base owes much to the Newberry Consort, and especially to Douglass and Hargis’s fleet-footed leadership…”
"This weekend, the Newberry Consort, which specializes in Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque music, will see the retirement of its longstanding directors, both of whom have spent more than 35 years with the ensemble. Following performance and administrative tenures that started with the Consort’s very first concert for David Douglass and its second year for Ellen Hargis, both will be stepping back from the co-director roles they’ve held for nearly 15 years, making way for Liza Malamut, a trombonist, educator, and presenter who’s appeared with eminent baroque and early music ensembles around the world…”
"Music has a tremendous power to bring that from any period. We get that if we listen to ’50s rock ’n’ roll; we weren’t alive then, but we know what it was like to be alive then. And the same can happen from something like 500 years ago, simply because it's such a unique sort of empathic scan…”
"The Newberry Consort brought a little Mexican warmth to a cold Chicago night with its annual concert “Mexican Christmas” program Friday night at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Evanston. Now in its 35th season, Chicago’s longest-running early music ensemble presented a program inspired by descriptions of 17th-century Mexican convents, where people would gather outside the cloister walls to hear the musically accomplished nuns sing, while villancico bands played outside the convent gates…”
I can’t believe our 36th season is over! It seems like only yesterday that I arrived in Chicago, even though the calendar tells me more than a year has gone by! During this time, The Newberry Consort presented four major programs: Madama Europa in the Gonzaga Court, featuring lush Italian music from sixteenth-century Mantua; an encore of A Mexican Christmas, guest directed by Artistic Director Emerita Ellen Hargis; Oracles, Prophets, and Dreams, with music by Orlande de Lassus and other composers; and Singen und Sagen: Music for Hope in a Time of War, a spectacular and heartfelt collaboration with the amazing vocalists of Bella Voce.