John Yannis
John Yannis (LAW’91) of Brighton, Mass., is general manager of Blue Heron, one of the world’s leading vocal ensembles for Renaissance music. In September, the group and its director, Scott Metcalfe, won the 2018 Gramophone Classical Music Award in the early music category, making it the first non-European group to win in the 41-year history of the award. “Gramophone awards (sometimes referred to as ‘British Grammys’) are widely recognized as the most prestigious classical music awards in the world,” John writes. “The winning disc included music from the Peterhouse partbooks, the largest extant source of pre-Reformation polyphony in England, copied in Oxford circa 1540 for Canterbury Cathedral.” The group, founded in 1999, tours nationally and has recorded five discs of material from the source—now released in the boxed setThe Lost Music of Canterbury.
From the Winter-Spring 2019 issue.