Montreal's Baroque Orchestra L'Harmonie des saisons and the Burlington Baroque Festival Singers open the 2026 Festival in FESTIVE Style, featuring four of 18th century France's greatest composers, among the most celebrated within a pantheon of great composers serving Louis XIV and Louis XV during France's Golden Age. A One Act Opera, a Grand Motet, an expansive Dance Suite, and a brilliant operatic Chaconne assure an exquisite evening of music!

Jean-Fery Rebel: The Character of the Dances
Marc-Antoine Charpentier: The Pleasures of Versailles (One Act Opera)
Jean Baptiste Lully: Chaconne from Armide
Sebastian Brossard: Grand Motet: In convertendo dominus

Featured soloists are:
Myriam Leblanc, soprano (Montreal)
Len Torrie, soprano (Montreal)
Nicholas Burns, alto (Vancouver)
Philippe Gagné, tenor (Quebec City)
Ryan Matos, tenor (Burlington)
Sumner Thomson, baritone (Boston)
William Kraushaar, bass (Montreal)

TICKETS HERE

Burlington Baroque & Ensemble L’Harmonie des saisons
Eric Milnes, conductor/continuo
Mélisande Corriveau, continuo

College Street Congregational Church, Burlington VT
THURS SEP 17 2026 7:30 p.m.

Johann Sebastian Bach assembled the monumental B minor Mass in the last years of his life, a compendium of some of his greatest works from across the length of his storied career. He viewed it as a summation of his life's work in sacred music, and had it bound in a volume that would lay ignored for decades. Without question one of the greatest masterworks in all of Western Music, the variety of styles, rhetorical flourishes and magnificent orchestrations expand a simple Mass Text into a tour de force baroque composition, never to be rivaled. To hear it with period instruments and a suitably small vocal ensemble is to hear it (unlike most modern performances) as Bach conceived it, an opportunity not to be missed.

J.S. Bach: Mass in B Minor, BWV 232

Ensemble member

TICKETS HERE

Burlington Baroque & Ensemble L’Harmonie des saisons
Eric Milnes, conductor/continuo
Mélisande Corriveau, continuo

College Street Congregational Church, Burlington VT
FRI SEP 18 2026 7:30 p.m.

The two genres which really made George Frideric Handel a rock star in 18th century London were Opera and Oratorio. The Operas, which assured his fame, were staged theatre events on secular and classical themes. The Oratorios, presented in concert without staging, were what occupied Handel during the season of Lent in which the performance of opera was proscribed. He wrote numerous of these large scale works mainly on Biblical subjects from the Hebrew Bible (a notable exception being, of course, MESSIAH.) After that most famous work, ISRAEL in EGYPT was one of the most popular works during his lifetime, presented more or less continually after writing it until his death. The work is extraordinary in that it contains an enormous number of choral movements, with relatively few arias for soloists, making it one of the most challenging and satisfying works for choruses to present, and captivating audiences to this day. It is a monumental pinnacle of the Oratorio genre, which retells the story of Moses leading the Israelites out of captivity in Pharoah's Egypt, including the miracle of salvation at the parting of the Red Sea - the work's climax. A tour de force for both chorus and orchestra, we are delighted to be presenting this performance on the Lane Series in the recital hall at UVM.

G.F. Handel: Israel in Egypt, HWV 54

Featured soloists are:
Myriam Leblanc, soprano (Montreal)
Nicholas Burns, alto (Vancouver)
Ryan Matos, tenor (Burlington)
Aldeo Jean, tenor (Montreal)
Sumner Thomson, baritone (Boston)
William Kraushaar, bass (Montreal)

TICKETS HERE

Burlington Baroque & Ensemble L’Harmonie des saisons
Eric Milnes, conductor/continuo
Mélisande Corriveau, continuo

UVM Recital Hall, Burlington VT
SUN SEP 20 2026 2:00 p.m.

Join us for an afternoon of songs by Clara and Robert Schumann, including his Dichterliebe, Op. 48.

TICKETS here

Len Torrie, soprano
Ryan Matos, tenor
Cole Marino, baritone
Eric Milnes, piano