Press

The New Yorker | Alex Ross

Singing Shadows

In February and March, during the six weeks of Lent, the vocal ensemble tenet presented a series called “tenebrae,” given over mainly to Renaissance and Baroque settings of Lamentations. The performances took place at Trinity Church, on lower Broadway, in the late afternoon, as the light was fading. (...) I attended all except two events in the Lenten series and repeatedly walked away in an exhilarated state: the music provided illumination of another kind.

The "TENEbrae" series was an even more formidable undertaking, one that in other hands might have been ill-advised. A work such as Gesualdo's Responsoria, with its labyrinthine structure of jarring harmonic shifts, cannot easily be tossed off amid other assignments.

TENET's singers and players registered not only the notes but also the space around the notes: there were superbly timed pauses, lingering contemplations of sustained chords, phrases like exhalations.

The New York Times | Zachary Woolfe

As the Cantatas Unfurl, a Reprieve Is Affirmed

Jolle Greenleaf, the artistic director of Tenet and a soprano who can both float and focus, led an excellent group of singers that featured the soprano Molly Quinn, the alto Luthien Brackett, the tenor Nils Neubert and the bass Steven Hrycelak. (...) the instrumental ensemble played with precision and freedom: the violinists Robert Mealy and Daniel Lee; the gambists Lisa Terry, Lawrence Lipnik and Motomi Igarashi (who also played the violone); Hank Heijink on the archlute; and, on organ, Avi Stein. These superb musicians will be familiar to Trinity regulars.

The Arts Fuse | Susan Miron

Green Mountain Project — Monteverdi at his most Audacious

This year their two NYC concerts were packed as was the performance in the cavernous St. Paul’s Church in Harvard Square. Artistic director Jolle Greenleaf (also a top-notch soprano) and music director Scott Metcalfe (also music director of Boston’s Blue Heron) have done everything right, paying careful, historically informed attention to pitch, transposition, tempi, number of performers, and tuning.

The Boston Musical Intelligencer | Cashman Kerr Prince

Voices Raised in Praise

For a year so young, this performance has already set the bar for all subsequent concerts so terribly, terribly high I fear all may pale by comparison. I commend Scott Metcalfe on a beautifully realized performance and I look forward to the next apparition of Green Mountain Project in the Boston area. As one woman I spoke to the day after the concert said, “What you heard was what a Venetian prince would have heard in 1610, neither less nor more.” Truer words.

The Boston Globe | Jeffrey Gantz

Rejoicing in Green Mountain’s sacred airs

Claudio Monteverdi’s “Vespro della Beata Vergine” of 1610 has been called his “secular contribution to sacred music.” To the five psalms, the Marian hymn “Ave maris stella,” and the Magnificat of the standard Vespers, Monteverdi added four motets to texts drawn from, among other sources, the Song of Solomon. The result is a full-blooded love song to the Virgin Mary, and Saturday evening at St. Paul Church in Harvard Square, it got a full-blooded reading from Green Mountain Project.

New York Times | Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim

Celebrating Monteverdi’s Vespers With Attention to 400-Year-old Details

Under Mr. Metcalfe, who conducted with violin in hand, the 13-strong ensemble of instrumentalists provided a flexible and sensitive accompaniment. Some of them joined in the singing of the final antiphon, and others took turns walking away from the stage while playing, letting the sound swirl through space like incense.

Within a performance that was so rigorously respectful of historical practice, moments like these showed the performers communing with this 400-year-old devotional music in ways that were playful, thoughtful and surprisingly personal.

The Boston Musical Intelligencer | Cashman Kerr Prince

‘Tis the Season…for Monteverdi

What began as a celebration has now become a tradition. Proclaiming the quadricentennial of Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespers, Jolle Greenleaf scheduled a New Year’s 2010 performance in Times Square—epicenter of our own annual announcement of time’s passage. Now she rings in each year with Monteverdi. Jolle Greenleaf is now artistic director, Scott Metcalfe music director, of Green Mountain Project, which takes its name from a literal translation of “Monteverdi.”

New York Times | Anthony Tommasini

Monteverdi’s Madrigals as Live-Action Dramas

On the second floor of the Italian Academy at Columbia University, a 1927 building in the style of a neo-Renaissance palazzo, is the Teatro, a commodious room with a carved-wood ceiling and a small stage. This is the kind of elegant space in which Book 8 of Monteverdi’s madrigals would probably have been performed in the composer’s day. So said the violinist Scott Metcalfe, the guest music director of the estimable vocal ensemble Tenet, on Saturday night to an audience of nearly 200 attending the group’s sold-out performance of excerpts from that astonishing Monteverdi collection, “Madrigals of Love and War.”

New York Times | James R. Oestreich

Green Mountain Project

The soprano Jolle Greenleaf and the violinist and conductor Scott Metcalfe have made Monteverdi a welcome fixture of the new year in New York. In 2010 and 2011, they presented the towering 1610 Vespers, and this year they produced a 1640 Vespers, something of a pastiche. Now it is back to 1610 and back to the church where it all began. A happy new year indeed.

New York Times | Vivien Schweitzer

French Baroque Rays of Light Pierce Lenten Shadows

The theorbo player Hank Heijink and the gamba player Sarah Cunningham offered soulful, elegantly wrought interpretations of three selections from Marais’s Pièces de Viole, Book 5, ...

The Arts Fuse | Anthony J. Palmer

Fuse Concert Review: Admiring New York’s Green Mountain Project

Green Mountain Project’s performance was music making at its best, historically informed, musically revealing, and sensitively and energetically performed—one could not ask for more. (…) What made this performance a one-of-a-kind occasion was the superb musicianship of all participants. The least of the singers was excellent, and there were moments of great artistry (…).

Condemned to Music | David Patrick Stearns

Tales of Two Vespers: 350 Years Apart, They Give the World What it Needs

Green Mountain Project performs Monteverdi with seemingly complete comprehension, confidence and grace. Singers are ideally chosen for both solo and ensemble singing, displaying great clarity of pitch without sounding antiseptic. Metcalfe’s pacing always had a strong sense of pulse.

Boston Globe | Jeffrey Gantz

Hitting new heights with “Vespers”

[A] stupendous performance. (…) Blue Heron sings with the tongues of men and women rather than angels, and that’s also true of GMP. (…) The audible interplay of voices with the variously deployed instrumental forces – two cornetti, five sackbuts, three violins, two theorbos, and organ – was a continual delight.

Boston Musical Intelligencer | Joel Schwindt

Mr. Green Mountain’s Vespers of 1640

[T]he performance itself was truly outstanding, as the performers displayed technical skill and musical artistry of the highest caliber. (…) The consistently high level of artistry makes it difficult to point out the high points.

The New York Times | Allan Kozinn

Presenting Sacred Works in a Style From the 1600s

The singers and players produced a glorious, smoothly blended, beautifully textured sound. [...] Highlights were plentiful.

Classics Today | Robert Levine

Mostly Monteverdi from Green Mountain Project

[T]hey were worth waiting for. (…) Do not miss this group when they perform again.

Leonard Link | Arthur S. Leonard

The Green Mountain Project’s “Grand Festive Vespers in Venice c. 1640″

[T]he performance was really superb, capturing the spirit of the piece with real fervor and bringing together an extraordinary collection of singers and performers on early instruments.

The New York Times | James Oestreich

A Nod to St. Cecilia, Patron Despite Herself

The ode “Welcome to All the Pleasures” was right on target: “With music we celebrate this holy day.”

New York Times | James R. Oestreich

An Exploration of the World That Made Bach and That Bach Remade

Most notable among the vocalists were the two sopranos — Jolle Greenleaf, Tenet’s artistic director, and Molly Quinn — and the bass, Mischa Bouvier.

New York Times | Allan Kozinn

Music in Review : TENET

TENET, the superb vocal ensemble directed by the soprano Jolle Greenleaf, devoted its Saturday evening concert to elegiac music, with particular attention to the déploration, a Renaissance form in which composers paid tribute to recently departed teachers and colleagues.

New York Times | Steve Smith

Worth a Reprise at Age 401

A tremendous popular and critical success, the concert might have been the culmination of a one-off labor of love.  Instead, evidently, it was the start of a beautiful friendship.

New York Times | James R. Oestreich

Vespers Born of Determination and Joy

It was advertised as “the first performance of 2010 to mark this anniversary in this country, possibly even the world.” If in fact it was, that was the least of its distinctions.

New York Times | James R. Oestreich

Sounds Both Skin Deep and Soul-Piercing

The singers perfectly rendered the line “I sing because I’m happy” without hokiness, and — equally infectious — they seemed happy throughout their lovely set because they were singing: sheer joy for the listener.

New York Times | Steve Smith

TENET : Six Assured Singers Harmonizing on a Trip Back to 1641 and Monteverdi’s Venice

Put simply, the performance was sensational. The six vocalists — [the soprano Jolle] Greenleaf, the mezzo-soprano Hai-Ting Chinn, the countertenor Ryland Angel, the tenors Philip Anderson and Marc Molomot and the bass Joe Chappel — sang with assurance and appropriate period style and blended smoothly while still registering individually.

New York Times | James R. Oestreich

Green Mountain Project : One Monteverdi Work and 400 Years of Debate

If this presentation was indeed the first of the year, that was the least of its distinctions. Far more important, it set a high standard for the many to follow.