Satirical works from medieval France, Provençe, and Germany provide a sharply etched and astonishingly contemporary perspective on our own nation’s current travails. The October 25^th concert at the Cambridge Friends’ Meeting House concert will include songs of the great Provençal troubadour and satirist Peire Cardenal, as well as pungent excerpts from Carmina Burana and the Roman de Fauvel. Tickets: HERE  An Interview with Artistic Director Anne Azéma follows.

FLE: Anne, welcome back from Europe. Before we get to Camerata’s upcoming 2025-26 program, can you share your thoughts with us on the season just past?

AA: Well, it was Camerata’s 70^th! Dense, challenging, requiring lots of effort, but so rewarding, and often a lot of fun.

Besides our in-town series, including our birthday bash at the Museum of Fine Arts and the mainstage concert at the Boston Early Music Festival, there was a West Coast tour, and two European tours, to Finland, France, Germany, and Austria. We were met with packed halls and standing ovations. But also, everyone, both here in the U.S. and Europe, wants to talk to us about increasing difficulties in the arts world. And yet, Camerata manages to get its message across, just about everywhere we go. For instance, the Austrian festival presenter, where we twice performed Borrowed Light in collaboration with the Tero Saarinen Company, told us she would have booked many more performances had she realized earlier the extent of the intense audience demand. Well, we hope to be back in Bregenz in the near future.

At home, we were heartened by the standing ovation we received at BEMF for Gallery of Kings, as well as for the press accolades for our magnificent musicians.

So can we safely say that all of you at Camerata are happy campers?

Understood, satisfaction at work well done is pretty important, and we’ll take the wins. But this North American summer camp of ours is undergoing a terrific amount of stress just now. Everyone is feeling the strain, from nerdy medievalists to committed community members at large. We are part of the bigger picture, and want to contribute what we can to shoring up our much-loved, stressed-out civilization.

How can an early music group contribute towards ameliorating today’s turbulence?

To begin with, every arts organization, including ours, affirms and re-affirms our shared, humane values. That’s really important in the face of so much regressive cruelty.

There are also specific actions we can undertake. As Americanists, we can continue boosting our country’s long struggle for liberty, equality, and inclusion, with programs like We’ll Be There and Free America. Even our spiritually oriented holiday show, An American Christmas 2025 – A Midnight Cry points to those solid American values that underpin our society.

And we can look at history, and music history, for earlier works of art that echo our own concerns. To cite the narrator of our Play of Daniel production, “Here in Boston people are / Much as they were in old Beauvais.”

Dissatisfaction was not invented yesterday, and protest against misrule has a rich (and highly enjoyable, even cathartic) tradition in medieval poetry and music. That’s the topic of our intown season opener on October 25 at 4 pm, City of Fools.

Medieval songs aren’t just about religious, or about romantic love.

Ah, yes, the postcard image is of minstrels strumming mandolins by moonlight. Hopefully our audience will be pleasantly shocked by the audacious thirteenth century satire we’ll be serving up. The opening song, by the great Provençal troubadour Peire Cardinal, describes a dream in which the whole world has gone mad, doing crazy pirouettes and dysfunctional gestures – everyone except the poet himself, who looks on in disbelief. The author eventually wakes up, and our concert continues. But the sense of being in a bad dream has been shared, I am sure, by many of us.

Are any evil rulers singled out by name?

Sometimes we get a monicker, like that of King Rudolph, who, stingy in paying his minstrels, is ridiculed at length over several verses. But sometimes the satire stays allegorical or general. Naming names, as we read in today’s newspapers, can get you in trouble. When Guilhem de Figuera calls out the corruption of the Roman church in D’un sirventes far I am sure people who heard it could hear between the lines, and supply their own lists.

So you stay in social criticism mode throughout the season?

No, there needs as well to be spaces for consolation and joy. At Christmas, we remain, through five concerts and two different programs, true to the Star of Bethlehem. And in the spring, assisted by lute virtuoso Nigel North, we celebrate the incredible lyrical gift of Elizabethan lutentist/songwriter John Dowland, the greatest English melodist until Purcell and Britten. Come away, come sweet love!