Faculty
Faculty Bios
Recorder
Annette Bauer, a native of Germany, studied medieval and renaissance music at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in Basel, Switzerland, specializing on recorder techniques with Conrad Steinmann (2001). She holds an MA in music from UC Santa Cruz (2004), and has been a student at the Ali Akbar College of Music in California since 1998, where she studies North Indian classical music on sarode, a stringed instrument. As a recorder player, Annette regularly performs with Istanpitta medieval music ensemble, and has appeared at the Santa Cruz Baroque and the Carmel Bach Festivals, as well as with Texas Early Music Project, Chamber Music San Francisco, the Catacoustic Consort, and the California Bach Society. She has served on the recorder faculty for several of the San Francisco Early Music Society summer workshops, as well as for the Texas Fall Toot, and the San Francisco Orff Certification Course. Annette currently also teaches music at a K-8 school in Oakland, CA, and regularly conducts recorder workshops and classes in medieval notation in the San Francisco Bay Area. She plays Brazilian percussion with Bateria Lucha, and is the co-founder of Magic Carpet, a duo dedicated to the art of improvisation.Website: www.annettebauer.com
Rachel Begley is an English recorder virtuoso, now based in New York. She is active as both soloist and orchestral player, and appears regularly with such ensembles as the New York Philharmonic, New York City Opera, the American Classical Orchestra, New York Collegium, Concert Royal, the Long Island Baroque Ensemble, and Philomel. As a soloist, she has performed at the prestigious Boston and Berkeley Early Music Festivals, as well as playing concertos and giving recitals throughout the country. She is a founding member of both the New Amsterdam Recorder Trio, who enjoy collaborative concerts with the internationally acclaimed Flanders Recorder Quartet, and the baroque ensemble, Sympatica.
Following studies at Indiana University's Early Music Institute, she gained a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in recorder and early music from SUNY Stony Brook in 1997. In addition to her performing career, Rachel teaches privately and at festivals and workshops in the US and Europe, and is Music Director for the Recorder Society of Long Island.
Website: rachelbegley.com
Letitia (Tish) Berlin teaches recorder and coaches ensembles in California and at workshops around the country, including the Amherst Early Music Festival, and the Port Townsend early music workshop. She is the director of the Hidden Valley Recorder Elderhostel (Carmel Valley, CA) and co-director of the San Francisco Early Music Society's Music Discovery Workshop for young children. Ms. Berlin performs regularly with the Farallon Recorder Quartet and the recorder duo Tibia. She has performed with the San Francisco Symphony, the Carmel Bach Festival and the Atlanta Baroque Orchestra. Recordings include works by Ludwig Senfl with the Farallon Recorder Quartet, Ladino love songs with Yatan Atan on the New Albion label and the second edition of the Disc Continuo play-along CD on the Katastrophe label. Ms. Berlin received a Master of Arts in early music performance practices from Case Western Reserve University and a Bachelor of Music in piano performance from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her mentors and teachers have included Inga Morgan, Saskia Coolen, Marion Verbruggen, Carol Marsh and Ross Duffin. Berlin is the President of the board of the American Recorder Society.
Frances Blaker earned pedagogy and performance degrees in recorder from the Royal Danish Conservatory of Music in Copenhagen. She performs as a soloist and in ensembles including Vermillian Trio and Farallon Recorder Quartet. She is the author of "The Recorder Player's Companion" and the "Opening Measures" column in American Recorder Magazine.Frances can be heard on the Disc Continuo series of play-along recordings. She has taught at several Fall and Summer Toots and is on the Executive Advisory Board of Amherst Early Music.
Deborah Booth plays Renaissance, Baroque, and modern flutes and recorders. Her training in flute performance was taken at Cincinnati Conservatory, the University of Kentucky, the Mannes School of Music - Historical Performance Program, and she has studied with Marion Verbruggen, Sandra Miller, Thomas Nyfenger, and other noted teachers in Amsterdam and New York. Ms. Booth played in several orchestras, including the Louisville Orchestra and the North Carolina Symphony. Performances include the Handel & Haydn Society, the Orchestra of St. Lukes, recorder soloist with the Ciompi Quartet, Gotham City Baroque Orchestra, Bach Vespers Period Ensemble, The Long Island Baroque Ensemble, The Ivory Consort, Christmas Revels, The Big Apple Baroque Band, Boston Early Music Festival, and Ensemble BREVE. The Times reviewed her performances as "technically precise and musically expressive." Recent recordings include a CD as flute and recorder soloist with the American Boy Choir ("American Songfest"), as well as soundtrack for the television show Blues Clues on recorder and krummhorns. Ms. Booth teaches at Greenwich Academy, directs the Princeton Recorder Academy, and has taught an played each summer at the Amherst Early Music Festival and numerous other summer festivals such as Pinewoods Early Music Week. In September of 2003 the Recorder Orchestra of New York (RONY) appointed Ms. Booth as their conductor.Website: www.flute-recorder-deborahbooth.com
Saskia Coolen studied recorder at the Amsterdam conservatoire with Kees Boeke and Walter van Hauwe. After this study she followed her inetersts in the Viol (Viola da Gamba) and musicology. Saskia Coolen was for many years a member of La Fontegara Amsterdam and gave regular concerts with ensembles such as the Freiburger Barockorchester, The Kings Consort and Tragicomedia. She recorded a number of CDs on the Globe label. For some time, Saskia Coolen has been a member of the recorder ensemble Brisk and Camerata Trajectina. In 1994 she established the ensemble Senario, which specializes in baroque chamber music in which the recorder takes a leading role. She was a teacher at the Hilversume Conservatoire and gives countless masterclasses throughout the world, particularly in the USA.
Rotem Gilbert, recorder and double reeds. Rotem is a native of Haifa, Israel. As a member of Piffaro, she has toured the United States, performed in festivals in Europe and South America, and collaborated with The King's Noyse, Capilla Flamenca, and The Concord Ensemble. Rotem has appeared with ARTEK ensemble, Fala Musica, La Caccia Alta, Chatham Baroque, Pittsburgh Camerata, and the Pittsburgh Opera. She is a founding member of Ciaramella. Rotem pursued undergraduate studies on recorder with Nina Stern at the Mannes College of Music, and holds a solo diploma in recorder from the Scuola Civica di Musica of Milan, where she studied with Pedro Memelsdorff. Rotem holds a Doctorate in Musical Arts (DMA) from Case Western Reserve University. Rotem can be heard on Deutsche Grammophon's Archiv, Passacaille, Musica Americana labels, Dorian, and Naxos labels.
Pat Petersen holds an MFA in Early Music Performance from Sarah Lawrence College. A Director Emerita of Amherst Early Music, she is a regular faculty member at Amherst's and many other workshops. She performs
on recorder and other early winds, and has appeared with the Charleston Symphony Orchestra. She has coached early music ensembles at Wake Forest University and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. An ARS certified teacher, she teaches recorder, early music, and English country dance in North Carolina and at workshops around the country, and has a
passion for playing from facsimiles of early 15th-century music.
Wendy Powers is a historical musicologist specializing in music of the late 15th and early 16th centuries, particularly in Italy and France. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1994, submitting a dissertation on The Music Manuscript Fondo Magliabechi XIX.178 of the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence: A Study in the Changing Role of the Chanson in Late Fifteenth-Century Florence, and is currently working on an edition of the complete works of the French composer Hesdin (d. 1538) for Broude Brothers. Prof. Powers has played and taught recorder in New York City for many years, and is co-director and faculty member of the Amherst Early Music Festival at Connecticut College. She is the former book review editor of American Recorder magazine, to which she has contributed articles and reviews. She has written about musical instruments for the Metropolitan Museum of Art Timeline of Art History (www.metmuseum.org). With Patricia Ann Neely, she co-directed Sag Harbor Early Music, a small spring concert series on Long Island, and she has sat for more than a decade on the Board of Directors of the New York City series Music Before 1800. Prof. Powers is the former Director of Development and Program Officer at the New York Council for the Humanities. She is teaching as an adjunct and co-directing the Collegium Musicum (with Susan Hellauer) at Queens College of the City University of New York.
Flutist, recorder player and Artistic Director and founder of Tempesta di Mare Gwyn Roberts has been a featured soloist with the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, the Portland Baroque Orchestra, Recitar Cantando of Tokyo, and at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC. American Record Guide has called her "a world-class virtuoso", and the Washington Post remarked, "with her sparkling technique and sensitive attention to musicality, she infused the music with operatic drama." Her recording of Veracini Recorder Sonatas earned a five star rating from BBC Music Magazine. As co-director of Philadelphia Baroque Orchestra Tempesta di Mare, she leads the ensemble in frequent performances from Oregon to Prague, records for Chandos (UK), and appears frequently on NPR's Performance Today. Recordings include, Deutsche Grammaphon, Dorian, Sony Classics, Vox, PolyGram, PGM, Newport Classics, and Radio France. Ms. Roberts is Director of Early Music at the University of Pennsylvania and is on faculty at Peabody Conservatory. She studied recorder with Marion Verbruggen and Leo Meilink and baroque flute with Marten Root at Utrecht Conservatory in the Netherlands.
Bart Spanhove is a member of the Flanders Recorder Quartet, or "Vier op ’n Rij". He has written a book about the techniques used in ensemble playing, "The Finishing Touch of Ensemble playing", which has been published in Japanese, German and Chinese. He is currently holds a research fellowship at the Lemmensinstituut Leuven, where he gives recorder lessons, to research the recorder music of the Flemish composer Frans Geysen. His findings will be published in 2008. Next to his concert activities, Bart Spanhove also gives a large number of master classes.
Nina Stern is one of North America’s leading
performers of the recorder and classical clarinet. In recent
years she is also hailed as an innovator in teaching
school-age children to be fine young musicians. A native
New Yorker, Ms. Stern studied with Jeanette van
Wingerden and Hans-Rudolf Stalder at the Schola
Cantorum Basiliensis in Basel, Switzerland, where she
received a Soloist’s Degree. From Basel, she moved to
Milan, Italy where she was offered a teaching position at
the Civica Scuola di Musica. Ms. Stern performs
regularly as soloist or principal player with prestigious
ensembles such as New York City Opera, The New York Philharmonic, The New York
Collegium, Concert Royal, Philharmonia Baroque, American Classical Orchestra and
Boston Baroque, She has also appeared with Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra, L’Orchestra
della Scala (Milan), I Solisti Veneti, Hesperion XX and Tafelmusik. Her numerous
festival appearances have included performances under leading conductors such as
Christopher Hogwood, Trevor Pinnock, Claudio Scimone, Kurt Masur, Lorin Maazel,
Jane Glover, Bruno Weil, Ton Koopman, Andrew Parrot and Jordi Savall. She has
recorded for Erato, Harmonia Mundi, Sony Classics, Newport Classics, Wildboar, Telarc
and Smithsonian labels.Ms. Stern is currently on the faculty of the Mannes College of Music where she directed the Historical Performance Program from 1989 to 1996. She has taught at the Five Colleges in Western Massachusetts and was twice a Visiting Professor at Oberlin Conservatory. Ms. Stern has been on the faculties of numerous workshops throughout the United States and in Europe.
Ms. Stern also serves as Director of Education for the New York Collegium, where she is co-founder of a successful hands-on music teaching project in inner city public school classrooms. This project involves instruction to entire classrooms on recorder and percussion, as well intensive after school instruction that includes classical guitar. The Washington Post applauded this program as a model in its “innovation in the classroom” series (11/9/03). For this important work Ms. Stern was awarded an Endicott Fellowship in 2003 and was honored in 2005 with the “Early Music Brings History Alive” Award, bestowed by Early Music America. Recently, Ms. Stern recently developed a classroom teacher-training course (“Flutes and Drums Around the World) for the Amherst Early Music Festival and will initiate a recorder course for the visually impaired at The Lighthouse in New York City in the fall of 2006. - Website
Han Tol is one of the most active recorder players in the world of early music. He plays about 90 concerts a year all over the world with several groups and as a soloist and conductor with the German "Balthasar Neumann Ensemble". He is also in great demand as a teacher for masterclasses throughout Europe and the USA and as a guest teacher at conservatories in places such as Vienna, Salzburg, Kopenhagen, Frankfurt, Geneva, St. Petersburg, Baltimore, Bloomington and Tokyo. Han Tol is professor at the "Hochschule für Künste" in Bremen, Germany. One can hear Han Tol's colorful and virtuosic playing on about 30 cd recordings by Teldec, Hyperion, Harmonia Mundi, Aeolus, Carus, OPUS 111, EMI and Globe.Han Tol takes a selection of his large collection of rare and valuable instruments along on his travels. One of these gems is an ivory instrument built around 1700 by the outstanding instrument maker, Johann Benedikt Gahn from Nuremberg.
A winner of
the Erwin Bodky International Competition, the Noah Greenberg Award, and
former student of Frans Bruggen, John Tyson is one of the world's most
acclaimed recorder artists. He has appeared as soloist in Italy, France,
Germany, England, Scotland, Chile, Japan, Taiwan, Canada, and throughout
the United States as well as with major ensembles in Europe and the U.S.
John has recorded for Erato, Harmonia Mundi, Sine Qua Non, Ventadorn records, and with the Handel & Haydn Society under Christopher Hogwood. His solo CD on the Titanic label, Something Old Something New, features Baroque and Contemporary music for recorder and strings . . ."An important new recording," said The American Recorder. His repertoire ranges from Renaissance and Baroque to contemporary, pop, and rock.
Widely sought after as a teacher, he is on the faculty of the New England Conservatory of Music and the Corso Internazionale di Music Antica in Urbino, Italy. He is a recognized expert in improvisation and early dance music and is music director of the Renaissance improvisational group RENAISSONICS.
Website: http://members.aol.com/TysonPage/
Reine–Marie Verhagen studied recorder with Walter van Hauwe at the then "Amsterdamsch Conservatorium". She finished her studies in 1976 and almost immediately began her teaching career at a diverse number of music colleges (including Enschede and Utrecht). Since 1988 she has been principal recorder teacher and teacher of verbon ADden technique at the royal conservatoire in The Hague. She is also active abroad (Europe, Japan and the USA) both as a teacher and performer (with the harpsichordist Tini Mathot she forms the basis of the Corelli-ensemble), has been jury member during the open Dutch recorder days in Utrecht (SONBU) and for the "Stichting Jong Muziektalent Nederland" (Dutch foundation for young musical talent). Since 1983, she has also taken part in many recordings and concerts with "The Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra" directed by Ton Koopman (Bach’s cantatas, Brandenburg concertos, as well as works by Händel, Purcell and Charpentier). Modern music is always part of her repertoire, from Japanese composers to Steve Reich.
Tom Zajac performs on the sackbut, recorder, bagpipes, and other instruments with the Renaissance wind band, Piffaro; occasionally performs with his own group, Ex Umbris. Appeared with many other early music groups in the US, toured extensively, appearing in concert series and festivals in Hong Kong, Guam, Australia, Israel, Colombia, Mexico, and throughout Europe and the US. With Ex Umbris, performed 14th-century music at the 5th Millennium Council event in the Clinton White House, 18th-century music for Ric Burn's "New York: A Documentary Film"; played hurdy gurdy for the American Ballet Theater, bagpipe for an internationally broadcast Gatorade commercial, and shawm for the NYC Gay Men's Chorus in his Carnegie Hall debut. In Dec. 2002 he played serpent in a PDQ Bach concert at Lincoln Center and the new Kimmel Center in Philadelphia. He teaches at Wellesley College and at recorder and early music workshops throughout the US.
Na'ama Lion has performed solo and chamber music recitals in Israel, Europe and the United States. She has performed with several orchestras and ensembles, including the Handel and Haydn Society Orchestra, Boston Baroque, and Sequentia, an ensemble for medieval music. Ms. Lion is a founding member of the chamber music ensemble Kammerton and the group New Quartet, which specializes in new compositions for baroque instruments. She holds a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from Boston University and a Soloist Diploma from the Arnhem Conservatory in the Netherlands, where her studies were supported by a scholarship from the government of the Netherlands. Her teachers have included Wilbert Hazelzet, Carla Kemme-Mahler and Christopher Krueger. She is currently on the faculty of the Longy School of Music, the Brookline Music School and Mather House, Harvard University. Ms. Lion has recorded for Deutsche Harmonia Mundi.
Recognized as one of North America’s leading performers on recorder and historical flutes, Toronto-born Alison Melville began playing the recorder in a school classroom in London (UK). Trained in Toronto, London and in Basel as the winner of numerous awards from the Canada Council for the Arts, her career as a soloist, chamber musician and orchestral player has taken her across Canada and the USA and to Iceland, Japan, New Zealand and Europe.
Her extraordinary breadth of experience as a performer comprises solo and chamber music recitals; music for dance, theatre, film and television; orchestral work with modern and period instrument orchestras; concerts in venues more varied than you can imagine, from Boston’s Jordan Hall or Tokyo’s Bunkamura Theatre to inner-city schools, ferry boats and prisons; musical repertoire from the 12th to 21st centuries, composed, arranged and improvised; and music from Celtic and Scandinavian traditions. She plays medieval, renaissance, baroque and modern recorders; renaissance, baroque and classical flutes and one-keyed piccolo; and Norwegian seljefløyte.
A member of the Toronto Consort and Ensemble Polaris, Alison Melville appears regularly as a soloist and orchestral player with the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra; she can be heard on their JUNO Award-winning recordings of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos and orchestral music of Jean-Philippe Rameau, and on numerous other Tafelmusik recordings on Sony, Analekta and CBC Records.
Together with Colin Savage, Alison co-founded and co-directs Baroque Music beside the Grange, a chamber music series which has presented over 178 concerts in one of Toronto’s oldest historic churches.
In frequent demand as a guest performer with other chamber ensembles, orchestras and festivals across North America, she has played on over forty CDs, including four critically acclaimed solo recordings. Alison’s playing has been heard on numerous radio stations including the CBC, BBC, NPR, Radio New Zealand and the Iceland State Broadcast Service, on the soundtracks of films by Atom Egoyan, Ang Lee and Amnon Buchbinder, and for several years she was a fixture on CBC-TV’s ‘The Friendly Giant.’
Her adventures with the world of early dance have included collaborations with several of North America’s leading historical dancers, including Catherine Turocy, Elaine Biagi Turner and Ken Pierce. And last but not least, her recent explorations in arrangement and composition have been heard across Canada and the USA in Peter Hannan’s ‘900 Years of Music,’ the ‘Post-Medieval Syndrome’ project, and with Ensemble Polaris.
Alison Melville teaches at the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music (Oberlin, Ohio) and at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Music.
Website: www.alisonmelville.com
One of today's leading performers on Baroque and early Classical flutes, Seattle native Janet See, who trained at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, has been principal flautist with the English Baroque Soloists. She has also been co-principal flautist with the Orchestre Revolutionaire et Romantique under John Eliot Gardiner and the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra under Nicholas McGegan, with whom she made a highly acclaimed recording of Vivaldi concertos for Harmonia mundi. As a soloist and with chamber ensembles, she has performed throughout Europe and North America and recorded for Archive, EMI, Erato, Hyperion, and Titanic. Her interpretations of the complete flute sonatas by Bach can be heard on the Harmonia mundi USA label.
Robert Eisenstein, violin, viol, recorder, founding member and program director of the Folger Consort, with which he has toured nationally, recorded extensively and for which he has composed program notes and lectured frequently on its wide ranging repertoire from the middle ages to the baroque. In addition to his work with the Consort, he is the director of the Five College Early Music Program in western Massachusetts, where he teaches music history, performs regularly on viola da gamba, violin, and medieval fiddle, and coordinates and directs student performances of medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque music. He is an active participant in Five College Medieval Studies and recently served as a Music Director for the Five College Opera Project production of the first opera by a woman composer, Francesca Caccini's La Liberazione di Ruggiero. He has a particular interest in the use of computer technology in the service of music and enjoys teaching a course at Mount Holyoke College called Fun with Music and Technology. He has performed with many ensembles including the Washington Bach Consort, the Newberry Consort, the National Symphony, Western Wind, and recently at Tanglewood, Amherst Early Music, and other summer festivals. He studied viola da gamba with Judith Davidoff and Richard Taruskin.
Heather Miller Lardin is a double bassist and viol player, appearing frequently with period instrument ensembles including Brandywine Baroque, The Publick Musick, and NYS Baroque. She received her Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Performance Practice from Cornell University and is a graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music. She is the artistic director of NYS Baroque.
Loren Ludwig comes from a long line of non-musicians. He plays new music on old instruments and odd music on new instruments, battling daily with the perils of anachronism. He often loses. Loren has performed as a soloist and chamber musician across the US and Europe, appearing with such groups as the Smithsonian Chamber Players, the New York Consort of Viols, Catacoustic, the Oberlin Baroque Ensemble, the Galileo Project, and many others. He studied viola da gamba and performance practice at Oberlin Conservatory and attended the Royal Conservatory of The Hague on a Fulbright fellowship. Recently, Loren has focused his musical energies on improvisation and composition, working with electric and acoustic violas da gamba, laptop, and numerous collaborators. He is a fourth-year in the University of Virginia's Critical and Comparative Studies in Music Ph.D. program, where he studies hip-hop and the musical culture of 17th-century England.
Martha McGaughey, viola da gamba, studied in Basel with Jordi Savall and in Brussels with Wieland Kuijken. For many years she was a member of the Paris-based Five Centuries Ensemble, known for its performances of both early and contemporary music. Ms McGaughey was a founding member of Musical Assembly, whose recording of the chamber music of Francois Couperin has received critical acclaim, as well as of New York's Empire Viols. She has toured with the Waverly Consort, performed with Concert Royal and the Aulos Ensemble, and appears regularly with the Brooklyn-based Capella Oratoriana and the Long Island Baroque Ensemble. Ms. McGaughey has also collaborated with the British viol consort, Phantasm, in several concerts and a CD of the consort music of William Byrd. She has recorded for the Fonit Cetra and Erato labels in Italy and France, as well as for EMI. Ms. McGaughey has taught at the Ecole Nationale de Musique Angoul ê me in (France), at the Eastman School of Music and at Stanford University. Since 1986 she has been on the faculty at The Mannes College of Music in New York. She has twice been a Regents' Lecturer at the University of California, San Diego, and teaches regularly at Amherst Early Music as well as at the San Francisco Early Music Society summer workshops. Ms. McGaughey's bass viol was made in Paris in 1983 by Guy Derat, after a seven-string instrument in the instrument museum in Geneva by Michel Colichon.
Gail Ann Schroeder graduated in 1980 from the University of Michigan with a Bachelor of Music degree in Music History. She furthured her performance studies on the viola da gamba at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels with Wieland Kuijken, where she obtained the First Prize in 1983 and the Higher Diploma, with distinction, in 1986. She has performed extensively as soloist and with various ensembles including the Huelgas Ensemble, Capilla Flamenca, Combattimento Consort Amsterdam and the Leipzig Barockorchester. She has participated in numerous radio and television productions, and on CD recordings for such lables as DHM, Sony Classical, Ricercar and Erato. From 1988-2002 she was assistant to Wieland Kuijken at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels where she taught viola da gamba, didactics of viola da gamba and was director of the viol consort. Currently living in North Carolina, she is now teaching privately and free-lancing on viola da gamba and lirone.
Mary Springfels remembers hearing New York Pro Musica perform early music for the first time when she was 14 years old. She said she immediately fell in love with it and began learning early music instruments in college. She began playing viola da gamba and related early music instruments professionally in 1968. She has been Musician-in-Residence at the Newberry Library since 1982.
Besides founding and directing the Newberry Consort, Springfels has performed and recorded extensively with such ensembles as the New York Pro Musica, the Waverly Consort, Concert Royal, Sequentia, Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, the Seattle Baroque Orchestra, Music of the Baroque, Musica Sacra, the Marlborough Festival, the New York City Opera, and Chicago Opera Theater, where she has served as an artistic advisor.
In Chicago Springfels has also served as a Senior Lecturer at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University. She has taught and performed in summer festivals throughout the US, among them the San Francisco, Madison, and Amherst Early Music Festivals, and the Conclave of the Viola da Gamba Society of America. In 2004 she delivered the keynote address to the Berkeley Festival and Exhibition for Early Music America.
Over the past few years, Springfels has become very active in baroque opera, and she has performed with organizations such as the New York City Opera and Central City Opera. She will continue this involvement as well as providing lectures.
Rainer Zipperling was first instructed by his father and then studied at the Conservatory in Den Haag (Violoncello with Anner Bylsma and Viola da Gamba with Wieland Kuijken).
Now he is active as freelance cello and gamba player. Besides being member of Camerata Köln he plays cello with the "Petite Bande" and "Orchester des 18. Jahrhunderts" (18th Century Orchestra). He regularly plays with "La Stagione", Frankfurt/Main, and "Ricercare Ensemble".
He also holds a chair for viola da gamba and violoncello at the Musikhochschule Frankfurt/Main and teaches the subject viola da gamba at the Musikhochschule Köln.
Violinist and conductor Dana Maiben, hailed by the Boston Globe for her "supremely joyous artistry," has earned international recognition for her performances of the 17th-century solo violin and ensemble repertory. She was a founder member of the groundbreaking ensemble for 17th century music, Concerto Castello, whose debut recording, Affetti Musicali, was nominated for a Deutsche Schallplatten Preise, and for whom she designed and co-directed the 1985 Schuetz anniversary celebration concert for the Boston Early Music Festival. Colin Tilney, writing in Continuo Magazine, cited her as “high priestess of the Italian 17th century solo.” In 2003 Maiben launched a new ensemble for 17th century music, Concerto Incognito.Miss Maiben is founding music director of the new ensemble Foundling, a baroque orchestra and women’s advocacy project based Providence, Rhode Island. She plays principal violin for Arcadia Players, Apollo Ensemble, and Ensemble Abendmusik, and has served as concertmaster of the New York Collegium under the direction of Christophe Rousset, Martin Gester, Paul Goodwin, and Andrew Parrott. Maiben frequently performs with her principal teacher, violinist Jaap Schroeder, with Arcadia Players Trio, and in duo with fortepianist Monika Jakuc. Recording credits include projects for Centaur, Dorian, EMI, and Hyperion.
Dana Maiben lived and worked in Rochester, New York from 1978-1988, where she taught at the Eastman School of Music, and served as founding music director of the Genesee Baroque Players, and as co-founder of the Genesee Early Music Guild. More recently she has been a frequent guest performer with the Rochester Bach Festival and Publick Musick. Since 1989 Maiben has served on the faculty of the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she teaches violin and medieval, renaissance, baroque, and classical performance practice, coaches chamber music, and occasionally directs opera. Her own opera,Look and Long, based on the play by Gertrude Stein, was presented in staged workshop at Smith College in 1998.
Originally a trumpet player from Portland, Grant Herreid is now a versatile musician/director/teacher on the early music scene. As a multi-instrumentalist and singer he performs frequently on winds, strings and voice with Hesperus and Piffaro, and he plays theorbo and lute with New York City Opera and the baroque ensemble Artek. He teaches at Mannes College of Music and directs the New York Continuo Collective.Grant has created and directed several theatrical early music shows, including 'Il Caffe d'Amore', a pastiche of early 17th century Italian songs and arias, and the 15th century English 'Holly and Ivy: A Mid-Winter Feast of Fools'. For the Amherst Early Music Festival he has created and directed 'A Day At The Faire', an Elizabethan rustic music-drama; an early 17th century production of Guarini's 'Il Pastor Fido'; and 'The Ballet of the Twelve Nations: Prelude to the Thirty Years War', an early 17th century German production featuring alchemy and intrigue. But mostly he devotes his time to exploring the art of the cantastorie and other esoteric unwritten traditions of early Renaissance music with the group Ex Umbris.
Arthur Haas is renowned throughout Europe and America as a peerless pedagogue and performer of Baroque and contemporary music. After receiving top prize in the 1975 Paris harpsichord competition, Mr. Haas remained in Paris from 1975 to 1983, performing in most major French early music festivals including le Festival Estival de Paris, Mai Musical de Bordeaux, and the Saintes Early Music Festival. Praised by Le Monde for his interpretation of French keyboard music, Professor Haas has recorded duo-harpsichhord music of Gaspard LeRoux with William Christie, solo CDs of music by D'Anglebert, Forqueray, and harpsichord music of the English Restoration. Prof. Haas is a member of the Aulos Ensemble and Musical Assembly, and has toured with such leading Baroque musicians as Marion Verbruggen, Julianne Baird, Stephen Preston, and Laurence Dreyfus. Much in demand as a teacher, Prof. Haas is a faculty member of summer early music music institutes in Berkeley, Amherst, and the Longy School of Music; he has also taught at the Eastman School and at Stanford University.
Peter Sykes has appeared in recital at conventions of the American Guild of Organists, the Southeastern Historical Keyboard Society, the Organ Historical Society, American Institute of Organbuilders, International Society of Organbuilders, at the Library of Congress, Boston Early Music Festival, Aston Magna Festival, New England Bach Festival, Portland Chamber Music Festival, New Hampshire Music Festival, and with Ensemble Project Ars Nova, The King’s Noyse, Musica Antiqua Köln, and throughout the United States, including an appearance in Boston’s Jordan Hall as a featured soloist (Bach's Fifth Brandenburg Concerto) in the Bank of Boston Emerging Artists Celebrity Series. He is frequently heard on the nationally syndicated radio program “Pipedreams.” Recent appearances include an all-Bach inaugural recital on a new organ built by Fritz Noack for the Langholtskirkja in Reykjavik, Iceland, Bach’s Goldberg Variations for the Renaissance and Baroque Society in Pittsburgh, Manuel de Falla's Harpsichord Concerto with the Chameleon Arts Ensemble, and the Schumann Piano Quintet on original instruments with the Van Swieten Quartet. In March 2004 he was given the honor of performing the dedication recital on the newly restored 1800 Tannenberg two-manual organ in Old Salem, North Carolina, featured on the nationally broadcast televsion show “CBS Sunday Morning.” He was a member of the continuo team for the Boston Early Music Festival opera productions of Cavalli's Ercole Amante, Lully's Thésée, and Conradi’s Ariadne, and appears regularly in concert and on recordings with Boston Baroque. With Christa Rakich he created "Tuesdays With Sebastian," an independent two-year benefit concert series in which he and Ms. Rakich performed the entire keyboard works of Johann Sebastian Bach for the organ and harpsichord in thirty-four recitals in five Boston area locations in the 2003-04 and 2004-05 concert seasons. He has premiered new works by Dan Locklair, James Woodman, and Joel Martinson, and has performed well over twenty dedication recitals for new or rebuilt organs.
His solo recordings include J.S. Bach’s complete Leipzig Chorales recorded on the Noack organ of the Langholtskirkja in Reykjavik, From The Heartland - Two Nordlie Organs in South Dakota, Harpsichord Music of Couperin and Rameau, A Nantucket Organ Tour, MAXimum Reger: Favorite Organ Works, and Modern Organ Music, a disc of music by Hindemith, Heiller, Pinkham, Woodman, and Icelandic composers on the Noack organ in the Neskirkja in Reykjavik. His bestselling recording of his organ transcription of Holst’s orchestral suite The Planets was named Best of 1996 by Audio Review, a “Super CD” by Absolute Sound in 1999, and garnered accolades in every review. He appears on the Cambridge Bach Ensemble recording The Muses of Zion, performing organ works of Tunder and Buxtehude on the Fisk meantone organ of Wellesley College, the Music from Aston Magna recording of the oratorio The Triumph of Time and Truth, in which he performs the first known organ concerto movement of Handel, a recording of the organ concerto Cymbale of Julian Wachner, and the Grammy-nominated Boston Baroque recordings of Handel’s Messiah, Bach's B-Minor Mass, and Monteverdi’s Vespers. His most recent solo recording, now available on the Raven label, is the dedication recital on the Tannenberg organ in Old Salem.
He holds degrees from the New England Conservatory, where he studied with Gabriel Chodos, Blanche Winogron, Mireille Lagacé, Robert Schuneman, and Yuko Hayashi, and Concordia University in Montreal, where he studied with Bernard Lagacé. In 1978 he was winner of the Chadwick Medal from the New England Conservatory for outstanding undergraduate achievement; in the same year, he was a winner of the school’s annual concerto competition, playing the Harpsichord Concerto of Frank Martin. In 1983 he was the winner of the Boston Chapter American Guild of Organists Young Artists Competition; in 1986, winner of the Second International Harpsichord Competition sponsored by the Southeastern Historical Keyboard Society. He was the 1993 laureate of the Erwin Bodky Award for excellence in early music performance. In May 2005 he received the Outstanding Alumni award from the New England Conservatory for career achievement since graduation.
He is Associate Professor of Music and Chair of the Historical Performance Department at Boston University, Director of Music at First Church in Cambridge, Congregational, and a member of the faculties of the Longy School of Music and the New England Conservatory. He has served as adjudicator for competitions sponsored by the American Guild of Organists, the Royal Canadian College of Organists, and the Bach International Harpsichord Festival, is a member of the board of the Cambridge Society for Early Music, and is a founding board member and current president of the Boston Clavichord Society.
Website: www.petersykes.com
With specializations in harpsichord, continuo, and instrumental and vocal chamber music, Webb Wiggins, who teaches harpsichord at the Oberlin Conservatory, has been a faculty member of the Oberlin Baroque Performance Institute and the Amherst Early Music Festival. Wiggins coordinated the Early Music Program at the Peabody Conservatory of Music at the Johns Hopkins University, where he was a member of the faculty from 1986 until 2005, and where he served as musical director of baroque operas in the Peabody opera department. He has also taught harpsichord at Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, and George Mason University, and was assistant to the director of the chamber music program at the Smithsonian Institution from 1985 to 1989, where he maintains an active performance and teaching relationship.Wiggins has performed extensively throughout the United States, the Netherlands, Taiwan and New Zealand as a soloist and with such ensembles as Apollo’s Fire, Hesperus, Pomerium, the Smithsonian Chamber Orchestra, the Baltimore Consort, the Baltimore Chamber Orchestra, the Folger Consort, Tempesta di Mare, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, the National Symphony Orchestra, and the Philadelphia Classical Orchestra.
He earned a bachelor of music degree from Stetson University in 1967 and a master of music degree from the Eastman School of Music in 1968. He also studied at the Sweelinck Conservatory in Amsterdam.
Marilyn Boenau, Baroque bassoon, has performed and recorded with most of the leading Baroque orchestras in North America, including Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, the Handel & Haydn Society, Portland Baroque Orchestra, Apollo's Fire, Tafelmusik, and Opera Lafayette. In Europe she has worked with The Harp Consort, Collegium Vocale, and Freiburg Baroque. In May 2005 she performed at the Handel Festspiele in Göttingen, Germany. She is the bassoon soloist with Music Pacifica on the Dorian CD La Notte, which includes several Vivaldi chamber concertos. Her playing has been called "breathtaking" by the Portland Oregonian. Marilyn holds a Soloist's Diploma from the Schola Cantorum in Basel, Switzerland, where she studied recorder, shawm, curtal, and bassoon with Michel Piguet and Walter Stiftner. She has performed Renaissance music with the Boston Shawm and Sackbut Ensemble, Blue Heron Renaissance Choir, and the Folger Consort. In addition to her performing career, Marilyn is the executive director of Amherst Early Music, Inc.
Adam Gilbert, music history, recorder and historical double reeds, is currently the director of the early music program at USC's Thornton School of Music in Los Angeles. Adam grew up in Columbia, South Carolina. The first graduate of the Early Music program at the Mannes College of Music in New York City, he has performed as a member of New York’s Ensemble for Early Music, the Waverly Consort and Piffaro, the Renaissance Band. He has appeared with ensembles such as Calliope, ARTEK, New York Cornet and Sackbut Ensemble, The Court Dance Company of New York, the Folger Consort, Concert Royal, The Bach Ensemble, Chatham Baroque, Newberry Consort, Canto (Colombia) and La Caccia Alta (Belgium) among others. He is also a founding member of ensemble Ciaramella, which performs concerts of fifteenth-century music in The United States, Israel and Belgium, and has recorded on the Naxos label. Adam studied recorder at Rotterdams Conservatorium and studied in Leuven, Belgium from 1998 to 2000 as a recipient of the Fulbright and Belgian American Education Foundation Grants working on his dissertation “Elaboration in Heinrich Isaac’s Three-Voice Mass Sections and Untexted Compositions.” He completed his PhD at Case Western Reserve University in 2003, and taught for two years as a visiting assistant professor at Stanford University. Adam can be heard on Dorian, Deutsche Grammophon’s Archiv, Passacaille, Musica Americana and Lyrichord labels. His research specialties include allusion in fifteenth-century song and Mass, pastourelles and their symbolism, improvisation, compositional processes and embellishment from 1400–1700. He lectures, gives master classes internationally and is an adjunct faculty of Tilburg Conservatorium in Holland. ~ website (USC) * website (Ciaramella)
Herb Myers is Lecturer in Renaissance Winds at Stanford University, from which he holds a DMA in Performance Practices of Early Music; he is also curator of Stanford's collections of musical instruments. As a member of the New York Pro Musica from 1970 to 1973 he toured extensively throughout North and South America, performing on a variety of early winds and strings; currently he performs with The Whole Noyse and Jubilate. He has taught at numerous summer workshops in the U.S. and Canada. As an expert in the history and construction of musical instruments, he is well known through articles and reviews in numerous journals and has contributed chapters to Early Music America's Performer's Guides to Medieval, Renaissance, and Seventeenth-Century Music. His designs for reproductions of Renaissance winds have been used by Gunther Korber and Charles Collier.
Debra Nagy, praised for her “dazzling technique and soulful expressiveness” (Rocky Mountain News), is in demand as a soloist and collaborative musician on both coasts, performing with baroque ensembles and orchestras in San Francisco (American Bach Soloists), Los Angeles (Musica Angelica), Portland (Portland Baroque Orchestra and Trinity Consort), Seattle (Seattle Baroque Orchestra), Cleveland (Apollo’s Fire), Philadelphia (Tempesta di Mare) and New York (Clarion Society and Ensemble Rebel). She has also appeared at many international early music festivals including the Boston & Berkeley Early Music Festivals, Regensburg (Germany), and Laus Polyphoniae (Belgium). A first-prize winner in the American Bach Soloists (ABS) Young Artist Competition, Debra has performed concertos by Bach and Vivaldi with ABS, the Baroque Chamber Orchestra of Colorado, and the San Francisco Bach Choir. She is also the founder of Les Délices, a Cleveland-based ensemble dedicated to chamber music of the French Baroque. Debra has a second specialty in fifteenth century music, performing on shawms, recorders and voice as a member of Ciaramella, in addition to joining Piffaro, the Newberry Consort, and the Blue Heron Renaissance Choir as a frequent guest artist.
Debra recently received her Doctor of Musical Arts in Early Music from Case Western Reserve University, where she directs the singers and instrumentalists of the Collegium Musicum in programs spanning the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries. Her research projects at Case included an edition of unique pieces from the Chansonnier Nivelle de la Chaussée (c. 1465), an analysis of the synthesis of instrumental virtuosity and vocal aesthetics in the works and performing career of Ludwig August Lebrun (for which she received Case’s Adel Heinrich Musicology Prize), and a reevaluation of the late-seventeenth century airs and brunettes repertory as a source of solo music for woodwinds. Dedicated to developing her scholarly interests, Debra has presented lecture recitals for the Society for Seventeenth Century Music, and is currently preparing her edition of unica from the Nivelle Chansonnier for publication. In addition, Debra spent 2002-2003 researching Renaissance double reed instruments in Brussels on a Belgian American Educational Foundation Grant while studying baroque oboe at the Conservatory of Amsterdam as a student of Alfredo Bernardini. Debra received her undergraduate and master's degrees from the Oberlin Conservatory, where she studied with James Caldwell and Gonzalo Ruiz.
Debra’s wide ranging discography includes a disc of fifteenth-century German instrumental and vocal music with Ciaramella (Naxos), “Stolen Gold” for amplified baroque and tape – a work written for Debra by composer Anna Rubin (Capstone Records), collaborations with vielle player Shira Kammen (“Mistral” on Bright Angel Records), Handel’s Acis and Galatea with the Montreal-based ensemble Les Boréades (ATMA), sacred music of Vivaldi with Toronto’s Aradia Ensemble (Naxos), Masses of Joseph Haydn with Ensemble Rebel (Hänssler Classics), and Lutheran Masses of J.S. Bach with the Washington Bach Consort (Loft Recordings). Recording projects for 2007 include Brandenburg Concertos with the American Bach Soloists, a disc of instrumental music by Johann Friedrich Fasch with Philadelphia's Tempesta di Mare, and Lully's Psyché with the Boston Early Music Festival. Debra looks forward to concerto performances with Seattle Baroque, and the Baroque Chamber Orchestra of Colorado, and a debut recording with Les Délices during the 2007-2008 season. She has had live performances featured on CBC Radio Canada, Klara (Belgium), NPR’s Performance Today, WQXR (New York City) and WGBH Boston.
Website: www.debranagy.com
Daniel Stillman, shawm, sackbut, co-founded
and directs the Boston Shawm & Sackbut Ensemble. As
a player of Renaissance wind instruments, he has
performed with the Gabrieli Consort, Taverner
Players, Apollo’s Fire, Folger Consort, La Nef (Montréal),
Trinity Consort, the Boston Camerata, Waverly Consort and the
avant-garde ensemble Roger Miller’s Exquisite Corpse.
As a player of historical trombone, he has performed
with the Smithsonian Chamber
Orchestra, Washington Bach Consort, Arcadia Players, Boston Baroque, Handel & Haydn Society, and
the Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra. Dan
teaches at Tufts, the Five College Early
Music Program, and the Longy School of Music.
Washington McClain is the current principal oboist of l'Ensemble Arion (Montreal) and Apollo's Fire Baroque Orchestra (Cleveland, Ohio). He has performed with many baroque orchestras in the United States and in Canada.Mr. McClain teaches at Indiana University in Bloomington. He has done recordings for Sony Classical Vivarte, ATMA Records, Analekta Records, and Centaur Records.
A native of California, Dominic Teresi moved to Toronto in 2002 to become principal bassoon of Tafelmusik. In demand on dulcian and baroque, classical and modern bassoons, Mr. Teresi’s solo playing has been described as “lively and graceful” (New York Times) and “dazzling” (Toronto Star), “reminding us of the expressive powers of the bassoon” (The Globe and Mail). In addition to his work with Tafelmusik, he has performed with Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra, Spiritus Collective, Le Concert d’Astrée, Toronto Consort, Ensemble Arion and Apollo’s Fire, and shares leadership of Chiaroscuro, an ensemble of early music specialists dedicated to exceptional 17th-century music performance. In 2006, he was a featured artist on CBC Radio’s New Generation Series, performing bassoon solos, concertos and chamber music. Mr. Teresi has recorded numerous CDs with Tafelmusik and is a featured soloist on Tafelmusik’s Concerti Virtuosi CD, nominated for a 2006 Juno award. Upcoming CD releases include music from the 17th-century collection Prothimia Suavissima with Chatham Baroque. Other recording highlights include Mozart and Beethoven Piano Quintets, produced by Bloomington Early Music Festival. Mr. Teresi teaches at Tafelmusik Baroque Summer Institute and at the University of Toronto. He has also taught at Amherst Early Music Festival and given masterclasses at Oberlin Conservatory and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He holds a master of music degree and an artist diploma in modern bassoon from Yale University, a medaille d'or from the Conservatoire National de Region in Bordeaux, France, and is completing doctoral work at Indiana University.
Kiri Tollaksen enjoys a varied career as a performer and teacher. Equally skilled on trumpet and cornetto (a wind instrument used primarily in 17th century Western Europe), Kiri has been praised for her "stunning technique, and extreme musicality," (Journal of the International Trumpet Guild). She has performed extensively throughout North America and Europe with numerous groups such as Apollo's Fire, The Folger Consort, Piffaro, Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, New York Collegium, Concerto Palatino, La Fenice, the Huelgas Ensemble, the Catacoustic Consort and Seattle Baroque Orchestra. She has performed both at the Boston Early Music Festival, and at the Bloomington Early Music Festival, and she is a regular member of the quartets La Gente d'Orfeo and Anaphantasia, both based in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
As a professional trumpet player, Kiri performs with the River Raisin Ragtime Revue in Tecumseh, Michigan, and freelances throughout Michigan. Since 2000, she has been trumpet soloist at Historic Mariner's Church in Detroit, Michigan (this church has reached national recognition for its annual memorial for the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Mariner's is referred to in Gordon Lightfoot's ballad). From 1996-2005, she played the Eb soprano saxhorn with the Dodworth Saxhorn Band (a re-creation of a 19th century community brass band, based in Ann Arbor). Kiri is featured on the Dodworth's latest CD, "Home Sweet Home." From 1995-2004, Kiri was a member of the Greater Lansing Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Maestro Gustav Meier.
Kiri is currently Adjunct Lecturer in Music at the Early Music Institute at Indiana University. She also maintains a teaching studio in Ann Arbor, and has taught cornetto at the Amherst Early Music Festival. Kiri holds performing degrees in trumpet from Eastman, Yale, and a Doctorate in Musical Arts from the University of Michigan. Her discography includes recordings with the Huelgas Ensemble, Apollo's Fire, Piffaro, The New York Collegium, La Gente d'Orfeo, the River Raisin Ragtime Revue and the Dodworth Saxhorn Band.
Website: www.kiritollaksen.com
Wim Becu was born in Berchem (Belgium). His first musical mentors, Koen Becu and Bruno Boey, introduced him to a hitherto unfamiliar world of "early music". This would later have a profound influence upon his musical development. In 1982, after completing his studies at the Royal Conservatories of Antwerp and The Hague, he began to collaborate with the Huelgas Ensemble. Thanks to his inexhaustible enthusiasm for studying and learning to play the many historic "trombones", he is now active in numerous renowned ensembles and orchestras. His repertoire covers late mediaeval to romantic music. He has made more than 100 CD recordings, and participated in numerous concerts together with his colleagues from Concerto Palatino. As an educator hes enjoys sharing his experience with his students in Antwerpen and at the Musikhochschulen of Aachen and Trossingen. He has given master classes and courses in Belgium, Germany, Spain, the United States, and at the CNS de Lyon.
Ross Brownlee began his musical training as a singer at the age of six with Donald Hadfield, in the All Saints' Men and Boys' Choir. Having found that music was one of the greatest joys of life, Ross continued his studies in Trombone Performance, graduating from Northern Illinois University with a Bachelor in Music Performance.After a few years of freelance work in Winnipeg, his great Early Music adventure began unfolding at McGill University in Montréal. Douglas Kirk, Ross' friend and mentor, snatched him from his orchestral pursuits and put a sackbut (the precursor of the modern trombone) in his hands! He played with the McGill Noyse, with members of the Boston Shawm and Sackbut Ensemble and with members of the Amherst International Early Music Festival, where he is now on faculty for the summer music workshop.
Ross hopes to introduce the haunting and beautiful sounds of the sackbut and cornetto to enthusiastic Winnipeg audiences. Ross is currently teaching instrumental music at St. John's-Ravenscourt School whilst madly renovating his old and needy home.
Shane Shanahan has studied drumming traditions from many different cultures and combines them with his training in classical Western music and jazz to create his own unique style. Since January of 2001 he has been touring all over the world performing with Yo-Yo Ma as a member of the Silk Road Ensemble. He is also a member of frame drum master Glen Velez’s Handance ensemble and Simon Shaheen's Qantara. Shane has performed with jazz legend Sonny Fortune, African multi-instrumentalist Foday Musa Suso, masters of Persian music Shahram and Hafez Nazeri, Mugam singer Alim Qasimov, Bang on a Can All-Star Robert Black, and composer Philip Glass, among others. He has also worked with Indonesian gamelans, Caribbean Steel Drum bands, throat singing choirs, free improvisation groups, contemporary music ensembles, orchestras, and many singer/song writers. During the spring semester of 2000, Shane was the director of the percussion department of at the University of Hartford’s conservatory, The Hartt School. He has presented workshops, performed, and studied in India, New Zealand, and Turkey, as well as all over the U.S. and Canada. He has also appeared on TV and radio throughout the U.S. and Canada as well as in Turkey, China, Taiwan, and Japan. Shane’s love of movement has led to many collaborations with a wide range of dancers. He has worked with belly dancers, North Indian Kathak dancers, South Indian Bharata Natyam dancers, as well as many modern dancers. He has created and performed music for dance all over North America and Turkey. When Shane is at home in New York City, he plays for dance classes at the Alvin Ailey School in addition to his active freelancing. He received his Bachelors degree and Performers Certificate from The Eastman School of Music and his Masters degree from The Hartt School.Website: www.shaneshanahan.com
French vocalist Anne Azéma is one of the world's leading interpreters of early vocal music. She has been acclaimed by critics on four continents for her original, passionate, and vivid approach to songs and texts of the Middle Ages. Anne Azéma has also been widely praised in many other repertoires, from Renaissance lute songs to Baroque sacred music to twentieth-century music theatre. Ms Azéma's current discography numbers over thirty five recordings as a soloist, recitalist or director on the Warner - Erato, Harmonia Mundi, Virgin, Nonesuch, Bridge, Calliope, Atma and K 617 labels. A featured soloist with The Boston Camerata (Joel Cohen, Director), she has taken prominent roles in many of that ensemble's tours and recording productions (Grand Prix du Disque). Ms. Azéma is a founding member of AZIMAN as well as the Camerata Mediterranea, touring with them internationally and appearing on all of their CDs (Edison Prize). Among her teaching activities are master classes, seminars and residencies at conservatories and universities in France, Holland, Mexico, Japan and the U.S. She has contributed articles to scholarly and general audience publications. For the 2007-2008 season, tours in the US, Australia, New Zealand, Bolivia and France are planned. 2008-2009 will mark her first season as the Artistic Director of The Boston Camerata.
Website: anneazema.com
Julianne Baird, soprano, has been hailed as "one of the most extraordinary voices in the service of early music that this generation has produced. She possesses a natural musicianship which engenders singing of supreme expressive beauty." She maintains a busy concert schedule of solo recitals and performances of baroque opera and
oratorio.
Ms. Baird has also appeared as soloist with many major symphony orchestras including the Cleveland Orchestra under Christoph von Dohnanyi, the Brooklyn Philharmonic under Lukas Foss, the New York Philharmonic under Zubin Mehta and, in the 2000-2001 season, the Philadelphia Orchestra. James R. Oestreich, in his comprehensive survey of New York's seasonal performances of Handel's Messiah for the N.Y. Times, recently concluded with special praise for Julianne Baird's interpretative skills: "in that respect, Ms. Baird remains the model".
Recent performances include appearances at the International Lufthansa Festival in London in solo cantatas of Johann Sebastian Bach and at Tanglewood's Ozawa Hall in the Mozart Requiem, Bach’s Magnificat in Bach’s own Thomaskirche in Leipzig, and at the International Wroclaw Festival of Song in Warsaw in September. In April, 2002 she is scheduled to appear in Symphony Hall, Chicago in Haydn’s Creation and in May in the Kennedy Center.
With over 100 recordings to her credit on Decca, Deutsche Gramophone, Newport Classics and Dorian, Julianne Baird is considered one of America’s most recorded women. In addition to her major roles in the acclaimed series of Handel operatic and oratorio premieres, she has a new solo album titled "Glorious Handel." The New York Philharmonic's recent commemorative box set to it’s century of recordings includes her recording of Reich’s "Tehillim". Other new recordings include "Dance on a Moonbeam", featuring Julianne Baird, Meryl Streep, and Frederica von Stade and “Passionate Pavanes.’ Deidamia--the last opera of George Frederic--with Julianne Baird in which she sings the title role.
Julianne Baird is an active teacher and scholar, with degrees from the Eastman School and a Diploma from the Salzburg Mozarteum in performance. She also earned a PhD in music history from Stanford University. Her publications include "Introduction to the Art of Singing", from Cambridge University Press. Recognized internationally as one of the few who can both demonstrate the full range of the singer's art and explain it - Dr. Baird is regularly asked to provide master classes at universities and music schools throughout North America. She also reaches large audiences through regional and national broadcasts including a recent featured interview on Terry Gross' internationally syndicated "Fresh Air". She is a distinguished professor at Rutgers University.
Website: juliannebaird.camden.rutgers.edu
After completing studies in voice and early music at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, Michael Barrett returned to the US in 2004 to take up conducting positions at Harvard University. While in Europe he was a member of the Huelgas Ensemble (dir. Paul van Nevel) and the Netherlands Bach Society (dir. Jos van Veldhoven). In the US Michael has worked with Blue Heron (dir. Scott Metcalfe), Seven Times Salt, Cut Circle (dir. Jesse Rodin), Boston Secession (dir. Jane Ring Frank), and Ensemble Trinitas (dir. Tom Zajac), and he appeared in the Boston Early Music Festival’s productions of Boris Goudenow in 2005 and Psyché in 2007. He directs the vocal ensemble Sprezzatura and is the new music director of Convivium Musicum. Michael received an AB in music from Harvard and an MM in choir conducting from Indiana University.
Emily Eagen works internationally as both a performer and teacher, specializing in early and contemporary repertoire. Beginning her singing-acting training with the Wesley Balk Institute in Minnesota, Emily holds degrees from Macalester College, the University of Wisconsin, and The Royal Conservatory of the Hague; has performed as a soloist with numerous ensembles including The Residential Orchestra of the Hague (Netherlands) and L’Arpeggiata (France); and works as a faculty member and performer at the Amherst Early Music Festival and the Augusta Heritage Center in West Virginia. Also a songwriter and award-winning whistler, Emily is currently working on a recording with gambist Loren Ludwig of original works and folk arrangements for voice, whistling, and electric viola da gamba.
Award-winning director, international performer, and recording artist Daniel Johnson has been the artistic director of the Texas Early Music Project since its inception in 1987. Johnson has performed and toured both as a soloist and ensemble member in such groups as the New York Ensemble for Early Music, Sotto Voce (San Francisco), and Musa Iberica. He can be heard on various recordings for Koch International, Foné Records (Rome), Amherst Festival Productions, and the Texas Early Music Project label.Johnson was the director of the UT Early Music Ensemble, one of the largest and most active in the U.S., from 1986-2003. In 1998, he was awarded Early Music America's Thomas Binkley Award for university ensemble directors. He is also the recipient of the 1997 Quattelbaum Award at the College of Charleston. Johnson teaches master classes in performance practice and also serves on the faculty, staff, and the Executive Advisory Board of the Amherst Early Music Festival. He has been on the faculty of the Texas Early Music Workshop [aka Texas Toot] since 1994 and has been its director since 2002.
Regarded for over two decades as one of the world’s finest countertenors, Drew Minter grew up as a boy treble in the Washington Cathedral Choir of Men and Boys. He continued his education at Indiana University and the Musik Hochschule of Vienna. Minter has appeared in leading roles with the opera companies of Brussels, Toulouse, Boston, Washington, Santa Fe, Wolf Trap, Glimmerglass, and Nice, among others. A recognized specialist in the works of Handel, he performed frequently at the Handel festivals of Göttingen, Halle, Karlsruhe, Maryland. He has sung with many of the world's leading baroque orchestras, including Les Arts Florissants, the Handel and Haydn Society, Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, Freiburger Barockorchester, and as a guest at festivals such as Tanglewood, Ravinia, Regensburg, BAM's Next Wave, Edinburgh, Spoleto, and Boston Early Music; other orchestra credits include the Philadelphia Orchestra, the San Francisco Orchestra and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. Mr. Minter is a founding member of the Newberry Consort and sings and plays early harps regularly with TREFOIL, My Lord Chamberlain’s Consort, ARTEK, and the Folger Consort. Mr. Minter has made over 50 recordings on Harmonia Mundi, Decca/London, Newport Classics, Hungaroton and others. He appears in two films: as Tolomeo in Peter Sellars’s “Giulio Cesare,” and as the Devil in “In the Symphony of the World; a Portrait of Hildegard of Bingen.” He writes regularly for Opera News.
Drew Minter is also a lauded stage director. He began as director of the operas at the Göttingen Händel Festival for five years, directing period baroque productions. Since then he has directed productions in many styles for the Opéra de Marseilles, Caramoor, the Boston Early Music Festival, Lake George Opera, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, Handel and Haydn, Boston’s Opera Aperta, the Manhattan School of Music, Mannes School of Music, Boston University’s Opera Institute, Amherst Early Music, the Folger Shakespeare Theatre, the Five Colleges in Northampton, Tempesta di Mare and Cleveland’s Apollo’s Fire. This past year he was named artistic director of Boston Midsummer Opera, which presented its first season in August 2006.
In addition to numerous workshops in the vocal and dramatic performance of baroque music, Mr. Minter teaches voice at Vassar College, where he also directs the Vassar Opera Workshop and conducts the Vassar Madrigal Singers. He has taught since 1989 at the Amherst Early Music Institute. He sings between thirty and fifty concerts each season with a variety of early music groups.
Website: www.drewminter.com
Lawrence Rosenwald is the Anne Pierce Rogers Professor of American
Literature at Wellesley College, where he has been teaching since 1980.
He has written extensively on American literary multilingualism, on
translation, on nonviolence, and on diaries, and has done numerous
translations from several languages. He has performed and recorded with
Schola Antiqua, Pomerium, Christmas Revels, and Jubal's Lyre, has written
and performed numerous verse scripts for early music theater pieces all
across the United States, and has been coaching singers on language and
text at the Amherst Early Music Festival since 1984.
Kaspar D. Mainz has appeared in more than 250 theatrical performances in Germany, Austria, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. He is the Artistic Director of Deliciae Theatrales, a group that specializes in theater, dance and music performances for children. He has taught at Salzburg University, University of Leipzig, Salzburg Mozarteum, and University of Graz. Mr. Mainz has offered workshops in historical dance in Europe and the United States.
Dorothy Olsson has had training in both music and dance; she received her Masters of Music of Musicology from Manhattan School of Music and her Ph.D. in Performance Studies at New York University, with a dissertation on early 20th-century dance. She has presented numerous workshops, choreographies and performances of historical dance, and written books and articles about historical dance. Dr. Olsson was an Assistant Professor of Dance Education at New York University for ten years. She is the director of New York Historical Dance Company.
Lawrence Rosenwald is the Anne Pierce Rogers Professor of American
Literature at Wellesley College, where he has been teaching since 1980.
He has written extensively on American literary multilingualism, on
translation, on nonviolence, and on diaries, and has done numerous
translations from several languages. He has performed and recorded with
Schola Antiqua, Pomerium, Christmas Revels, and Jubal's Lyre, has written
and performed numerous verse scripts for early music theater pieces all
across the United States, and has been coaching singers on language and
text at the Amherst Early Music Festival since 1984.
In recent years Alexander Weimann has established a reputation as one of the leading harpsichordists and ensemble leaders of his generation. He has performed throughout Europe, Canada and the United States, and has appeared at prominent festivals and concerts in Berkeley, Boston, Tanglewood, Washington, Montreal, London, Paris, Madrid, Göttingen, Halle, Karlsruhe, Ludwigsburg, Schleswig-Holstein, Graz, Innsbruck, Salzburg, Vienna, Utrecht, etc. He is a regular member of Tragicomedia and also appears as frequent guest artist with Cantus Cölln, Ensemble 415, Freiburger Orchestra, and Tafelmusik, among others.Mr. Weimann was born in Munich, Germany, where he studied musicology, theatre, theory, medieval Latin, organ, church music, and jazz piano from 1985 to 1990. In 1997, his group Le Nuove Musiche won first prize in the early music competition Concorso Premio Bonporti in Rovereto, Italy. From 1990 to 1995, he taught music theory at Münchner Musikhochschule, and since 1998, he has given classes in harpsichord, chamber music and performance practice at the Lunds University in Malmø, Sweden, the Hochschule für Musik in Bremen, Germany, and also at several American festivals and universities, including Berkeley, Boston, and Dartmouth. Mr. Weimann currently lives in Berlin and Montreal.
