““…it was interesting how, with only four players and two singers, it ranged from polished miniature to operatic extra-large.”
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Our Mission
The Sarasa Ensemble is a collective group of international instrumentalists and vocalists who perform classical music of outstanding quality, spanning the 17th to the 21st centuries, on both period and modern instruments, and bring this music to diverse communities. Through the ensemble's outreach program in adolescent detention facilities, it is dedicated to bridging cultural, aesthetic, and economic barriers and providing incarcerated teenagers with opportunities for growth, self-expression, and enrichment through music.
Jennifer Morsches and Tim Merton, Artistic Directors
THE SARASA CHAMBER MUSIC ENSEMBLE has received critical acclaim for its "informed and impassioned music-making" and is hailed for its "great clarity" and "irresistible energy." Drawing on a pool of more than one hundred musicians from the United States, Canada, Europe, and Asia, the ensemble varies in size according to the particular type of program with repertoire ranging from the 17th to the 21st centuries.
The ensemble produces the Sarasa Chamber Series in Cambridge and Lexington, Massachusetts and has toured throughout New England performing at the Frick Collection, the Morgan Library, the 92nd Street Y, the Boston Early Music Festival Series, Brattleboro Music Center, and the University of Vermont Lane Series. Performing for and working with teens in lock-up facilities throughout the state of Massachusetts, Sarasa was unanimously awarded the Department of Youth Services Commissioner’s Community Partner Award for service to the community in September 2018. Sarasa was also featured on WHRB’s The Artery about their work in the DYS facilities.In 2007, Sarasa won the 'outstanding achievement award' from Early Music America in recognition of its invaluable work with incarcerated teens in the Greater Boston area.
"Sarasa" is named after Saraswathi Natarajan, a South Indian educational activist who founded the Bapagrama Educational Center in Bangalore, India. Sarasa visited and performed at this free, inter-caste, co-educational, secular school for the rural poor in 1999. “Sarasa" is also the diminutive of Saraswathi, the divine power deity of the full essence of the Artistic.
