WCJ Recommends
Classical Artist
Biography
Joel Cohen is a leading authority in the field of medieval and Renaissance musical performance. He has received widespread acclaim as performer, conductor, and writer/commentator in his chosen field, and his unique style of program building has made the Boston Camerata ensemble famous on five continents.
Mr. Cohen studied composition at Harvard University. Awarded a Danforth Fellowship, he spent the next two years in Paris as a student of Nadia Boulanger. He has taught and lectured at many East Coast universities, including Harvard, Yale, Brandeis, and Amherst. Abroad, he has given seminars and workshops at the Schola Cantorum in Basel, at the Royal Opera of Brussels, in Spain, Singapore, and Japan. With soprano Anne Azéma, he co-directs an annual workshop in medieval song in Coaraze, France. His professional honors include membership in Phi Beta Kappa, the Erwin Bodky award in early music, the Signet Society medal from Harvard, the Goerges Longy Award, and the Howard Mayer Brown Award for lifetime achievement in early music, the Grand Prix du Disque, and the Edison Prize. He is an Officier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of the French Republic. He was appointed Artist in Residence in the Netherlands during 2000, the first American musician to be so honored.
Mr. Cohen's chosen repertoires span many centuries and countries, and over thirty LP-CD programs have been recorded under his direction, for Nonesuch, Telefunken, Harmonia Mundi, Erato, Warner Classics, and other labels. He has, however, taken a special interest in French music of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and early baroque. Thanks to a series of CD recordings, concerts, and publications, his pioneering work in the roots of early American music has also won extensive praise.
In 1990 Mr. Cohen founded a new ensemble, the Camerata Mediterranea, devoted to the performance of early-music repertoires from the Mediterranean basin. His cross-cultural collaborations with Middle Eastern musicians have taken an increasingly central role in his activities and musical thought since the mid-1990s.
Joel Cohen is well known in Europe and America as a radio commentator on early music. Mr. Cohen's first book, Reprise, was published in 1985. An anthology of Shaker songs featuring many of his transcriptions appeared in 2003. His arrangements of early American tunes provided the inspiration for much of the score to the film Geronimo (1994). His close collaboration with Finnish choreographer Tero Saarinen resulted in the important dance production Borrowed Light, based on original Shaker music, and first seen in Le Havre, France, in October 2004.
The most recent new recording on Warner Classics is A Mediterranean Christmas, released in November 2005.
