The musicians of the Boston Early Music Festival (BEMF) have been travelling to Bremen on a regular basis for many years, having made several successful recordings in the Sendesaal, including their 2014 Grammy Award-winning recording of Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s »La Descente d’Orphée aux Enfer«. The world-famous musicians and their artistic directors Stephen Stubbs and Paul O’Dette have also been repeat guests at the Musikfest Bremen.

The Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra is made up of the world’s top baroque instrumentalists. It has performed numerous concerts with renowned soloists and presented modern premieres of baroque serenades and cantatas with BEMF singers. One of the BEMF’s most successful ventures is their groundbreaking baroque opera recordings, which have received several Grammy nominations, the German Record Critics’ Award, the Diapason d’Or de l’Année and the ECHO Klassik in addition to the aforementioned Grammy Award.

Now in its 36th season, the »world’s leading festival of early music« (The Times) continues to tour regularly in North America and Europe with performances at Carnegie Hall, the Morgan Library & Museum (New York), the Concertgebouw Amsterdam and the Handel Festivals in Göttingen and Halle, among others. On its tours, BEMF performs operas and concerts with the BEMF Orchestra and their chamber and vocal ensembles, including the Boston Early Music Festival Chamber Ensemble. The small, select edition of the BEMF Orchestra, which last performed at the Musikfest Bremen in 2023, employs exceptional musicians from all over the world for baroque music and baroque opera. Depending on the size and needs of the projects, the ensemble is led by Paul O’Dette and Stephen Stubbs or by its concertmaster Robert Mealy, one of the USA’s most famous violinists in the field of early music.