Baroque Cello Bootcamp Faculty
Phoebe Carrai, director
Phoebe Carrai, a native Bostonian, completed her post graduate studies in Austria with Nikolaus Harnencourt, after studying with Lawrence Lesser and receiving her B.M. and M.M. at New England Conservatory of Music. She became a member of Musica Antiqua Köln in 1982, making over 40 recordings for Deutsche Gramophone and touring the world.
Ms. Carrai’s teaching career in historical performance started at the Hillversum Conservatory in the Netherlands and spending 16 years on the faculty of The University of the Arts in Berlin, Germany. She is presently on the faculties of The Juilliard School and The Longy School of Music. She started “New Year’s Resolution Baroque Cello Bootcamp” 15 years ago and it is still one of her greatest joys each year! In the summers, when not at her favorite spot on Cape Cod, she can be found teaching at Amherst Early Music, Aria Camp, The Bach Cello Suites Workshop and at Juilliard sponsored courses in Montisi, Italy and Brugge, Belgium.
Along with her solo and chamber music concerts, she directs Harvard Baroque Chamber Orchestra and performs regularly with Philharmonia Baroque, The Arcadian Academy, Juilliard Baroque, The Boston Early Music Festival and the Göttingen Festival Orchestra.
Ms. Carrai has released recordings of the Bach Solo Cello Suites, a duo recording of Frederich August Kummer, and has now also released “Out of Italy” for Avie Records. She has also recorded for Decca, Deutsche Gramophone, Aetme, Telarc and BMG. She plays on an Italian cello from ca. 1690.
Peter Sykes, co-director
Peter Sykes is a member of the organ department faculty at the University of Michigan, a core faculty member and principal instructor of harpsichord at the Historical Performance Department of the Juilliard School in New York City, and teaches organ and harpsichord at Boston University. He also has been Music Director at First Church in Cambridge since 1985, directing the choir and playing their 1972 Frobenius organ. He performs extensively in recital and has made ten solo recordings of organ and harpsichord repertoire ranging from Buxtehude, Couperin and Bach to Reger and Hindemith and his acclaimed organ transcription of Holst’s “The Planets.” Newly released is a recording of the complete Bach harpsichord partitas on the Centaur label, and an all-Bach clavichord recording on the Raven label; soon to be released will be the complete Bach works for violin and harpsichord with Daniel Stepner. He often performs and teaches in Europe, and has been a judge in numerous harpsichord and organ playing competitions. A founding board member and current president of the Boston Clavichord Society as well as past president of the Westfield Center for Historical Keyboard Studies, he is the recipient of the Chadwick Medal and Outstanding Alumni Award from the New England Conservatory, the Erwin Bodky Prize from the Cambridge Society for Early Music, and the Distinguished Artist Award from the St. Botolph Club Foundation.
Special Topic Lecturers and Performers
Cynthia Roberts is one of America’s leading baroque violinists, appearing as soloist, concertmaster, and recitalist throughout North America, Europe, and Asia. She is a faculty member of the Juilliard School, and toured this spring with the Juilliard 415 baroque orchestra to India, and as concertmaster under Masaaki Suzuki to New Zealand. She also teaches at the University of North Texas and the Oberlin Baroque Performance Institute and has given master classes at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, Indiana University, Eastman, the Cleveland Institute, Cornell, Rutgers, Minsk Conservatory, Leopold‐Mozart‐Zentrum Augsburg,
Shanghai Conservatory, Vietnam National Academy of Music, and for the Jeune Orchestre Atlantique in France. She appears regularly with the Trinity Baroque Orchestra, Smithsonian Chamber Players, Tafelmusik, and the Boston Early Music Festival and is a principal player in the Carmel Bach Festival. In Europe, she has performed as concertmaster of Les Arts Florissants and appeared with Orchester Wiener Akademie, the London Classical Players, and the Taverner Players. She was featured as soloist and concertmaster on the soundtrack of the Touchstone Pictures film Casanova and toured South America as concertmaster for a production featuring actor John Malkovich. Ms Roberts made her solo debut at age 12 playing the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto with the Grant Park Symphony of Chicago. Her recording credits include Sony, CPO, and Deutsche Harmonia Mundi.
Elise Groves, soprano, is a dedicated and versatile soloist and chamber musician. Her repertoire ranges from Medieval to new compositions, with a special focus on the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Recent solo highlights include Haydn’s “Lord Nelson” Mass (Church of the Advent), Mozart's Requiem and Coronation Mass (Church of the Advent), Bach's St. John Passion (Ensemble Musica Humana, Schola Cantorum of Boston) and St. Matthew Passion (Brown University), and fully-staged versions of Schütz's Weihnachtshistorie (Musica Nuova/The Weckmann Project) and Hildegard's Ordo Virtutum (Ensemble Musica Humana, Cantoris), as well as ensemble appearances with The Tallis Scholars, Vox Vocal Ensemble, Handel and Haydn Society, True Concord Voices & Orchestra, Exsultemus, and The Bach Project. A native Oregonian, she received a B.A. and M.A. in Music Education from Oregon State University and an M.M. in Early Music Performance from the Longy School of Music. When Elise isn't singing, you can find her doing various things with yarn or continuing her lifelong search for the perfect cup of hot chocolate.
Nicola Canzano (b. 1991) is a composer, harpsichordist and organist specializing in historical composition and improvisation. His compositions in baroque style have been performed by ensembles around the world, and some are used as course material at the University of Oregon.
Nicola is professor of harpsichord at Michigan State University and a staff accompanist at The Juilliard School, where he also occasionally lectures on topics such as fugal improvisation. In addition to giving talks about a variety of topics, he was a panelist at the first International Conference on Historical Improvisation, and maintains a large private studio for historical improvisation and composition. He founded the ensemble Nuova Pratica, a group which specializes in composing and performing their own music in styles of the past on period instruments.
Nicola continues to be sought after as a thoughtful continuo player, having played under Masaaki Suzuki, Richard Egarr, Jane Glover, Gary Wedow, Paul Watkins, and Dmitri Sinkovsky, among many others. For 14 years he worked for different Episcopal Churches around the country directing music and playing organ. He holds degrees from Juilliard, the University of Michigan, and the University of California, and was a student of Edward Parmentier, Joseph Gascho, Béatrice Martin, Peter Sykes, and Richard Egarr. His greatest love in the world is his little beagle mix, Riley.
Previous Special Topic Lecturers and Performers
Jennifer Morsches enjoys an international career as a versatile cellist, acclaimed for playing with “intelligence and pathos” (The Strad) and a “fine mixture of elegance and gutsiness” (Gramophone). She is the principal cellist of Florilegium and Co-Artistic Director of Sarasa Ensemble. World premieres include pieces by Julian Grant, David Matthews, Michael Wolpe and Ben Zion Orgad. She is a founding member of Richter Ensemble and member of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Les Siècles and Orchestre des Champs- Élysées. Jennifer graduated Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude, First Group Scholar from Smith College with degrees in Music History and
German Literature, and was awarded the Ernst Wallfisch Prize in Music. She received her Master’s and Doctorate in Cello at the Mannes College of Music and SUNY at Stony Brook. Recipient of the CD Jackson Prize at Tanglewood she was featured on Wynton Marsalis’s educational music videos with Yo-Yo Ma. Awarded a Finzi Travel Scholarship and residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris), Jennifer has focussed research on the ambiguous history of the five-string piccolo cello.
Elisabeth Reed teaches Baroque cello and viola da gamba at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where she is co-director of the Baroque Ensemble. Recent teaching highlights include master classes at the Shanghai Middle School, the Royal Academy of Music, the Juilliard School, and the National Viola da Gamba Society Conclave. Her playing has been described in the press as, “intense, graceful, suffused with heat and vigor” and “delicately nuanced and powerful” (Seattle Times). A soloist and chamber musician with Voices of Music, Archetti, Pacific Musicworks, and Wildcat Viols, she has also appeared with the Smithsonian Chamber Players, American Bach Soloists and the Seattle, Portland, Pacific, and Philharmonia Baroque Orchestras. She can be heard on the Virgin Classics, Naxos, Focus, Plectra, and Magnatunes recording labels and has many HD videos on the Voices of Music Youtube channel. She also teaches Baroque cello and viola da gamba at the University of California at Berkeley. She is a Guild- certified practitioner of the Feldenkrais Method of Awareness Through Movement.
Coordinator, musicology program. Andrew Talle studied at Northwestern from 1990-1995, earning a bachelor’s degree in cello performance as a student of Hans Jørgen Jensen, as well as bachelor’s and master’s degrees in linguistics. From 1995-2003, he was a PhD student at Harvard University, earning master’s and doctoral degrees in musicology. Dr. Talle spent one year lecturing at Harvard before moving to Baltimore in 2004 to join the musicology faculty at the Peabody Conservatory. In 2011, he was named a Gilman Scholar of the Johns Hopkins University, a distinction reserved for fewer than 20 faculty members across all nine divisions. He joined the Northwestern faculty in 2017.
Dr. Talle’s research focuses on musical culture in the time of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750). He has published articles in the Bach Jahrbuch, the Cöthener Bach-Hefte, and Mitteilungen des Leipziger Geschichtsvereins, among others. He is the editor of a collection of essays by leading scholars entitled Bach and His German Contemporaries published by the University of Illinois Press. The same publisher recently produced his monograph, Beyond Bach: Music and Everyday Life in the Eighteenth Century. Dr. Talle’s current projects include a book about popular music in Bach’s time and a collection of accounts of the city of Leipzig written by eighteenth-century travelers.
Kate Bennett Wadsworth is a cellist and gambist devoted to historical performance of all periods, with a special research interest in 19th-century performance practice. She has appeared at festivals throughout Europe and North America with baroque ensembles such as B’Rock, Arion, Tafelmusik, Apollo’s Fire, Aradia, Masques, and the Theatre of Early Music, and her continuo playing can be heard on the Naxos, ATMA, Artemis/Vanguard,and early-music.com labels. As a soloist, she has appeared with Arion Baroque Orchestra, Les Bostonades, Norwich Baroque, and Les Goûts Réunis Luxembourg, and her recording of the CPE Bach A minor concerto with Les Bostonades was released in 2015.
Kate studied modern cello with Laurence Lesser at the New England Conservatory and baroque cello with Jaap ter Linden at the Royal Dutch Conservatory in the Hague, after completing a bachelor’s degree in Scandinavian studies at Harvard College. In 2018, she completed a practice-led PhD under Clive Brown at the University of Leeds, looking at the notoriously marked-up editions of the cellist Friedrich Grützmacher as a window onto 19th-century performance practice. Drawing on similarly marked-up editions, as well as treatises, memoirs, early recordings, and other historical sources, she prepared annotated editions of the Brahms cello sonatas, in collaboration with Clive Brown and Neal Peres da Costa and published by Bärenreiter. Her recording of the Brahms sonatas with pianist Yi-heng Yang, released on the Deux-Elles label in 2018, has been praised for its “narrative quality” (Gramophone) and its “ardor and depth” (Early Music America).
Kate is currently working on an edition of the Schumann Cello Concerto for Bärenreiter, as part of a research project funded by the Leverhulme Trust and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, called “The flexible text: reuniting oral and written traditions in 19th-century music”.
“Her sense of musical gesture and line has the strength and grace of a wild animal: Her melodies soar, not like a rocket, but like an eagle, responding to every turn of harmony and thought the way the bird responds to changing currents of air.” -Early Music America
Praised for her “total involvement with the inner life of the lowest voice” (New York Concert Review Inc.), cellist Madeleine Bouissou has a vision to redefine the purpose of performing on classical instruments among her peers and pupils. When she first heard a historical piano, Madeleine was struck by the variety of colors in sound and the unpredictability of the instrument itself. This inspired her to explore historically informed performance (HIP). The gut strings, various temperaments, and ornamental improvisations require a quickened flexibility from the player as if always hearing the music and instrument for the first time.
In 2020, Madeleine began training to become an Alexander Technique teacher, because she wanted to learn how to have that same quickened flexibility with her use of her self. Her work with the technique runs parallel to her work with the cello: both demanding the awareness to experience every moment as if it’s the first time. She integrates her work with the Alexander technique with her cello playing, teaching, and coaching.
She went to Juilliard Pre-College and then continued at The Juilliard School where she completed her bachelor’s degree and master’s degree as a full scholarship student in Historical Performance. She also holds an Artist Certificate from the Koninklijk Conservatorium Den Haag. Madeleine is a New Ensemblist in the period performance ensemble Arcangelo led by Jonathan Cohen and is also completing her final year as an Alexander Technique teacher trainee at the Alexander Technique Centre of Amsterdam.
Alexander Nicholls is an award-winning violoncellist, and musicologist specialising performance and study of eighteenth-century music. He holds degrees in both music performance from the Juilliard School (USA), and The University of Western Australia, as well as a musicology degree from The University of Sydney (AUS). Gaining momentum from orchestral experiences and studies with various international artists across three continents, Alexander appears in concerts and recordings with various ensembles and orchestras across the world. Alexander is currently undertaking his doctoral studies at the Universität für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Wien (AT) under the supervision of Dr Clive Brown where he is studying the violoncello performing practices of King Friedrich Wilhelm II (1744–1797). He is passionate about the recovery of neglected eighteenth-century music through various mediums, and historically informed approaches to musicology.
Akiko Sato is harpsichordist, organist, and the artistic director of Les Bostonades, a period-instrument ensemble that has been sharing chamber music with Boston-area audiences since its founding in 2005. She holds graduate degrees in organ performance and sacred music from the Cleveland Institute of Music and Southern Methodist University, with additional training in harpsichord and continuo at McGill University. Under her direction, Les Bostonades has produced 17 seasons of concerts featuring music of the great and lesser-known composers of the Baroque period, as well as two acclaimed CDs. After slowing down for a few years due to illness and the pandemic, she is back to performing before a live audience. On Saturday, January 21st, 4pm at the Gordon Chapel of Old South Church, she will be sharing the stage with celebrated tenors Zachary Wilder and Aaron Sheehan, and gambist Emily Walhout performing the famous lamentation — Leçons de ténèbres, by François Couperin. Visit Bostonades.org.
Elise Groves, soprano, is a dedicated and versatile soloist and chamber musician. Her repertoire ranges from Medieval to new compositions, with a special focus on the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Recent solo highlights include Haydn’s “Lord Nelson” Mass (Church of the Advent), Mozart's Requiem and Coronation Mass (Church of the Advent), Bach's St. John Passion (Ensemble Musica Humana, Schola Cantorum of Boston) and St. Matthew Passion (Brown University), and fully-staged versions of Schütz's Weihnachtshistorie (Musica Nuova/The Weckmann Project) and Hildegard's Ordo Virtutum (Ensemble Musica Humana, Cantoris), as well as ensemble appearances with The Tallis Scholars, Vox Vocal Ensemble, Handel and Haydn Society, True Concord Voices & Orchestra, Exsultemus, and The Bach Project. A native Oregonian, she received a B.A. and M.A. in Music Education from Oregon State University and an M.M. in Early Music Performance from the Longy School of Music. When Elise isn't singing, you can find her doing various things with yarn or continuing her lifelong search for the perfect cup of hot chocolate.
www.elisemgroves.com
David Watkin was a Choral Scholar at Cambridge, where he read Music while studying the cello with William Pleeth and singing with Kenneth Bowen. Research begun at Cambridge resulted in performances, recordings and publications in Early Music, The Strad and in CUP’s volume Performing Beethoven. His recordings have received critical acclaim as soloist, guest with the Tokyo Quartet, Robert Levin and Fredericka von Stade, and as a member of the Eroica Quartet. His Bach Cello Suites (Resonus) won both Gramophone and BBC Music Magazine Awards and is included in Gramophone’s 50 Greatest Bach Recordings. He was the first cellist to be awarded the BBC Music Magazine Instrumental Award. He was Principal Cello of the English Baroque Soloists, Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique, the Philharmonia and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.
Conducting and teaching are now his focus, and he has conducted groups including the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, the Malta Philharmonic, the Swedish Baroque Orchestra, the Academy of Ancient Music and the European Union Youth Orchestra and ensembles at the Royal Academy of Music, The Guildhall School of Music. He is a Professor at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.
Cellist Elinor Frey enjoys performing, teaching, and researching early music, new music, and everything in between. Her albums on the Belgian label Passacaille–most of which are world premiere recordings–include La voce del violoncello, Berlin Sonatas, with Lorenzo Ghielmi on fortepiano, Fiorè, which features soprano Suzie LeBlanc, and Giuseppe Clemente Dall’Abaco: Cello Sonatas (2020). Her critical edition of Dall’Abaco’s complete sonatas is published in collaboration Walhall Editions. Frey’s album of new works for Baroque cello, titled Guided By Voices, was released on the Analekta label in 2019. In recent years she has performed with various ensembles in Canada and Europe, as well as with her quartet, Pallade Musica. Frey holds degrees from McGill, Mannes, and Juilliard. She teaches early cellos at the University of Montréal, is a course instructor at McGill University, and is a Visiting Fellow in Music at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University.
Cellist Kristin von der Goltz studied with Christoph Henkel in Freiburg and William Pleeth in London. She was a member of the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra from 1991 to 2004. She now performs on both modern and Baroque cello, and is in demand internationally as a solo cellist for conductors such as Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Ton Koopman, Marc Minkowski, and others. She has been a member of Trio Vivente since 1992 and of the BerlinerBarockSolisten, an ensemble of the Berliner Philharmoniker, since 2006. In 2009 she was appointed Professor of Baroque Cello at the Musikhochschule Frankfurt am Main, and in 2011 at the University of Music and Performing Arts Munich.
Benjamin Katz, harpsichordist, performs early and contemporary music. He studied harpsichord with Arthur Haas (NYC), Lisa Crawford and Webb Wiggins (Oberlin Conservatory), and Peter Sykes at Longy School of Music of Bard College. He has performed as a soloist and with ensembles and commissioned new works for harpsichord from Steven Long. He was a recipient of the Frank Huntington Beebe Fund and spent 2013-14 as an Early Career Research Associate at the Institute of Musical Research, University of London, studying partimento manuscripts of composer Bernardo Pasquini in the British Library. Past projects include a Bach@7 with Philadelphia Choral Arts, a presentation on Nicola Porpora's partimenti at the Stile Galante International Porpora Conference, and an Alexander Hamilton themed concert presented in collaboration with soprano Julianne Baird and Ed Mauger at Rutgers University (New Brunswick).
Mr. Katz will be Continuo Accompanist for Baroque Cello Bootcamp.
Matthew Wadsworth studied lute at London’s Royal Academy of Music with Nigel North, after which he spent a year at the Royal Conservatory of Music in The Hague.Working in the UK, Europe and North America as a soloist and chamber musician, Wadsworth has appeared at most major concert halls and festivals, and can often be heard on radio, both in live performance and recordings.
His many CD recordings for Channel Classics, Linn Records, Deux-Elles and Wigmore Live have all received international critical acclaim, and have been featured as Gramophone Editors Choice on 3 occasions.Matthew’s Colaborations with singers include Sopranos Carolyn Sampson, Julia Doyle and Emma Kirkby, counter-tenor Christopher Ainslie, tenor James Gilchrist and baritone Peter Harvey.
In July 2018, Matthew gave the first performances of a new concerto for theorbo, written for him by composer Stephen Goss. This included the premier in Hong Kong, and then performances with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Northern Chamber Orchestra. His latest CD release features songs by Henry Purcell with soprano Julia Doyle and Ensemble Unmeasured.
His recording of the concerto with the SCO is now out on the Deux-Elles label.Wadsworth is looking forward to collaborating with Dame Evelyn Glennie on a new piece for theorbo and marimba, being written for them by Stephen Goss.
Matthew has given concerts at the Bruges festival, the Klara festival, the Wigmore Hall, Purcell Room, The Sam Wanamaker Theatre at Shakespeares Globe, the Georgian Concert Society (Edinburgh), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) and the Lufthansa, York, Bath, Swaledale, Beverley, Warwick, Spitalfields, Holt, North York Moores, Budapest, Vancouver, Ottawa, Montreal Baroque, Mitte-Europa and Innsbruck festivals.
He has also worked as a soloist with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Northern Chamber Orchestra, and as a continuo player with The Academy of Ancient Music, English Touring Opera, Birmingham Opera Company, Independent Opera, The Netherlands Bach Society, I Fagiolini, The English Cornett and Sackbut Ensemble, The Musicians of the Globe, Arion, Constantinople, The Theatre of Early Music and Les Violons du Roy.
Born in Viersen Markus Möllenbeck studied at the FOLKWANG UNIVERSITÄT DER KÜNSTE in Essen with Janos Starker, Maria Kliegel und Young-Chang Cho. Afterward he joined the baroque cello class of Phoebe Carrai in Hilversum (Netherlands) and became principle cellist of MUSICA ANTIQUA KÖLN with Reinhard Goebel in 1992. He has performed worldwide in many prominent venues, several times playing cello concertos. He took part in many productions for German broadcasts and the Archiv Produktion of the Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft.
Since 2000 he dedicated himself to chamber music with the ARCANGELO TRIO. Another focus became the collaboration with the choreographer Joachim Schlömer for festivals in Vienna, Amsterdam, Bruges, Freiburg, Cologne and Ludwigsburg.
As principle cellist Markus Möllenbeck was guest at the MUSICIENS DU LOUVRE with Marc Minkowski, at the FREIBURGER BAROCKORCHESTER, CONCERTO KÖLN, La STAGIONE Frankfurt with Michael Schneider and until today at the CAPELLA AUGUSTINA with Andreas Spering. He worked in operas of Handel like RODELINDA, ALCINA and ARIODANTE at the State opera of Hamburg, Karlsruhe, Munich and Barcelona as a continuo cellist with Ivor Bolton, Michael Hofstetter and Harry Bicket. Möllenbeck is member of the Handel Festival orchestras in Karlsruhe and in Göttingen.
He is teaching with great passion giving master classes at the music universities of Detmold, Lübeck, Warshawa and Poznan, in Michaelstein, at the Handel Academy in Karlsruhe and since 2004 once a year at the international summer academy in Neuburg a.d.D. Between 1996 and 2012 he hold the class for baroque cello at the UNIVERSITÄT DER KÜNSTE in Berlin.
Since 2005 Möllenbeck has taught at the FOLKWANG UNIVERSITÄT DER KÜNSTE in Essen and was appointed professor for baroque cello in 2011 at the ACADEMY OF MUSIC in Bydgoszcz/Bromberg (Poland).
As a tutor he worked for the EUBO (European Baroque Orchestra) with the director Lars Ulrik Mortensen in Echternach 2015 and Bukarest 2016.
As an expert for the cello repertoire of the 18th century he has published 19 cello concertos of this period in his edition IL VIOLONCELLO CONCERTATO within the Edition WALHALL of the Franz-Biersack-Company in Magdeburg like A. Caldara, J.W. Hertel, J.A. Hasse, A. Vivaldi, A. Vandini, C.P.E. Bach, K.F. Abel and recently G. Perroni and Carl Friedrich Abel.
Another series (IL VIOLONCELLO SOLO) provides Berlin cello sonatas composed by F. Benda, K.H. Graun and G. Zarth beside Vivaldi’s trio sonata c Minor.
Allen Whear is Associate Principal Cellist of Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra and Artistic Director of Baltimore’s Pro Musica Rara. He is Principal Cellist and Recital Director for the Carmel Bach Festival and has been a guest of the Smithsonian Chamber Players, Musica Antiqua Köln, Music in Context, Vienna Boys Choir, Concert Royal, Mozartean Players, Washington Bach Consort, and Aradia Ensemble. He teaches baroque cello at the University of North Texas and at the Tafelmusik Baroque Summer Institute and has given master classes at universities across North America as well as China and Vietnam. A frequent pre-concert lecturer and writer of program notes, his liner notes for Mozart and Beethoven symphonies can be found on the Sony and Analekta labels. A graduate of the New England Conservatory and the Juilliard School, he studied with Anner Bylsma in the Netherlands and holds a doctorate from Rutgers University. His orchestral composition Short Story was commissioned and premiered by Tafelmusik. His recording credits include Sony, Virgin, Musical Heritage, Naxos, and Deutsche Harmonia Mundi.
Tanya Tomkins is Artistic Director and Co-Founder of the Valley of the Moon Music Festival in Sonoma and is equally at home on Baroque and modern instruments. She has performed on many chamber music series to critical acclaim, including Frick Collection, “Great Performances” at Lincoln Center, the 92nd Street Y, San Francisco Performances, and the Concertgebouw Kleine Zaal.
Renowned for her interpretation of the Bach Cello Suites, recording (Avie) and performing them many times at New York’s Le Poisson Rouge, Seattle Early Music Guild, Vancouver Early Music Society, and The Library of Congress. For the past 20 years Tanya has been one of the principal cellists of the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra and Portland Baroque Orchestras, and appeared numerous times as soloist.
On modern cello, she is a long-time participant at the Moab Music Festival in Utah, Music in the Vineyards in Napa, and a member of the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble and recently a member of the Delphi Trio. As an educator, Tanya has given master classes at Yale, Juilliard, and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and together with Eric Zivian, runs the Apprenticeship Program at the Valley of the Moon Music Festival.
Eric Zivian is a fortepianist, modern pianist and composer. He has performed with the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, the Portland Baroque Orchestra, the Santa Rosa Symphony and the Toronto Symphony. He is a founder and Music Director of the Valley of the Moon Music Festival - a festival specializing in Classical and Romantic music on period instruments. Eric is using this period of shelter in place to learn all 32 Beethoven piano sonatas on the period instruments he owns.
Eric is a member of the Zivian-Tomkins Duo, the Benvenue Fortepiano Trio, and the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble. As composer, he was awarded an ASCAP Jacob Druckman Memorial Commission for Three Character Pieces, premiered by the Seattle Symphony in March 1998.
Eric studied piano with Gary Graffman and Peter Serkin and composition with Ned Rorem, Jacob Druckman, and Martin Bresnick. He attended the Tanglewood Music Center both as a performer and as a composer.
Baroque cellist Beiliang Zhu is a past grand prize winner of the Leipzig International Bach Competition and considered to be one of the finest baroque cellists in North America.
She received her Master of Music from the Juilliard School in Historical Performance with Phoebe Carrai (Baroque cello) and Sarah Cunningham (Viola da Gamba), and Bachelor of Music Degree and Performer's Certificate from the Eastman School of Music. Beiliang is the principal cellist of the Pacific Baroque Orchestra.
Hailed by the New York Times as “particularly exciting”, and by the New Yorker as bringing “telling nuances” and being “elegant and sensual, stylishly wild,” Beiliang has given solo recitals at the Bach Festival Leipzig, Boston Early Music Festival, the Seoul Bach Festival, the Helicon Foundation.
Fascinated by studies of cultures, Beiliang believes firmly in the communicative qualities of musical performances and therefore invites the listeners to converse with her through various means.
William Skeen is a member of the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, and serves as its music librarian. He is also principal cellist with the American Bach Soloists, and former principal cellist of Musica Angelica.
As musical entrepreneur, he has founded several ensembles and organizations including the New Esterházy Quartet, La Monica, Cantata Collective, and the SF Early Music Society’s Classical Workshop.
William taught at the University of Southern California from 2000-2020.
One of America’s most prominent baroque violinists, Robert Mealy has been praised for his “imagination, taste, subtlety, and daring” by The Boston Globe. The New Yorker called him “New York’s world-class early music violinist.”
Mr. Mealy began exploring early music in high school, first with the collegium of UC Berkeley and then at the Royal College of Music in London, where he studied harpsichord and baroque violin. While still an undergraduate at Harvard College, he was asked to join the Canadian baroque orchestra Tafelmusik. Since then, he has recorded and toured with a wide range of distinguished early music ensembles both here and in Europe, and led orchestras for Masaaki Suzuki, William Christie, Andrew Parrott, Paul Agnew, Nicholas McGegan, and Helmuth Rilling, among many others.
A frequent leader and soloist, Mr. Mealy is principal concertmaster at Trinity Wall Street, which has now begun their second multi-year survey of the complete Bach cantatas. He is also Orchestra Director of the Grammy Award-winning Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra, which he has led in a decade of festival performances and recordings. The Boston Phoenix remarked of one BEMF production that “the most exceptional music came from the pit. Concertmaster Robert Mealy played more music than anyone onstage or off, every measure of it with erudition and compelling energy.” He has appeared at international music festivals from Berkeley to Belgrade, and from Melbourne to Edinburgh; most summers, he is a featured performer at Les Jardins du William Christie. His most recent project with BEMF, a sensational opera by Graupner, was just released this month.
Mr. Mealy is co-director of the seventeenth-century ensemble Quicksilver, whose debut recording, Stile Moderno, was hailed as “breakthrough recording of the year” by the Huffington Post. He has been Director of Juilliard’s distinguished Historical Performance Program since 2009, and has led his students in tours around the globe. From 2003 to 2015, he directed the postgraduate Yale Baroque Ensemble and the Yale Collegium Musicum. Prior to that, he taught at Harvard for over a decade, where he founded Harvard Baroque. In 2004, he received EMA’s Binkley Award for outstanding teaching and scholarship. He has recorded over 80 CDs on most major labels. He still likes to practice.
Keiran Campbell was drawn to the cello after he stumbled across one in his grandmother’s basement and was baffled by its size. Once he turned 8, he began taking lessons -on a much smaller cello- in his native Greensboro, North Carolina. After studying extensively with Leonid Zilper, former solo cellist of the Bolshoi Ballet, he received his Bachelors and Masters at the Juilliard School in New York, working with Darrett Adkins, Phoebe Carrai, and Timothy Eddy. Keiran also spent several springs in Cornwall, England, studying with Steven Isserlis, Ralph Kirshbaum, and David Waterman at the International Musicians Seminar in Prussia Cove. Now based in Toronto, ON, Keiran is Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra’s newest core member.
Described as “a delightful performer… playing with the ease of a pub fiddler,” (The WholeNote) and “an active, sparkling participant in the musical conversation” (Toronto Star), Keiran has performed with orchestras including The English Concert, Le Concert Des Nations, NY Baroque Incorporated, Philharmonia Baroque, The Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra, Trinity Wall Street Baroque Orchestra, and Mercury Baroque. In addition to this, Keiran has explored a wide variety of styles and genres, such as performances of Mozart and klezmer music with clarinetist David Krakauer at Jazz at Lincoln Center, experimental hip hop with DJ Spooky at Carnegie Hall, performances as a soloist with Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra, Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, and Trinity Wall Street, and productions of period Bel canto opera and chamber music each summer at Teatro Nuovo.
As a chamber musician, Keiran has collaborated with members of the Juilliard Quartet and the Cleveland Quartet. He recently performed alongside Enrico Onofri and Vittorio Ghielmi, and in fall 2019, he performed under the direction of Jordi Savall in a tour of Europe and a new recording of the Beethoven Symphonies with Le Concert Des Nations.
Keiran maintained a private teaching studio in New York City, and he recently gave masterclasses at UNC Chapel Hill, Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, and at Tafelmusik Winter Institute.
Keiran is also fascinated by instrument making, which he studies with the maker of his cello, Timothy Johnson.
photo credit: Marco Borggreve
Cellist and viol player Jonathan Manson was born in Edinburgh and received his formative training at the International Cello Centre in the Scottish Borders, later going on to study with Steven Doane at the Eastman School of Music in New York. A growing fascination for early music led him to Holland, where he studied viola da gamba with Wieland Kuijken. For ten years he was the principal cellist of the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra, with whom he performed and recorded more than 150 Bach cantatas and, together with Yo-Yo Ma, Vivaldi’s Concerto for two cellos. Jonathan is now principal cellist of the Dunedin Consort and co-principal of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. Jonathan is a founding member of the viol consort Phantasm, which has toured worldwide and won three Gramophone Awards, and the cellist of the London Haydn Quartet, whose latest recording in their series of Haydn’s complete quartets (op. 76) has just been released on the Hyperion label. A long-standing partnership with the harpsichordist Trevor Pinnock has led to critically acclaimed recordings of the Bach sonatas for viola da gamba and harpsichord, and, together with Rachel Podger, Rameau’s Pièces de clavecin en concert. Other recent highlights have included recitals with Elizabeth Kenny, Carolyn Sampson and Iestyn Davies, being invited to play the solo viol part in George Benjamin’s opera Written on Skin at the Royal Opera House, and concerto appearances at the Wigmore Hall and the South Bank Centre. He lives in Oxfordshire and is a professor at the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal Northern College of Music.
Cellist Andrea Stewart has been heard in venues across North America, Europe, and Asia performing solo recitals and collaborating with ensembles including Infusion Baroque, collectif9, Arion Baroque Orchestra, Grammy-nominated Uccello, Gruppo Montebello, and Ensemble Caprice. A finalist of the Golden Violin Competition (McGill University), the Eckhardt-Gramatté National Music Competition, and the Prix d’Europe Competition, Andrea holds the degrees of Doctor of Music (2015) and Master of Music (2009) from McGill University. Her research has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council in Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.
Rebecca Shaw, Assistant Director
Rebecca Shaw has a genuine excitement and enthusiasm for the music and instruments she plays. Rebecca has been heard with various ensembles in the Boston area, and has played with ensembles including Eudamonia, Les Bostonades, Guts Baroque, Mystic River Baroque, Musical Offering, The Weckmann Project, The Arcadia Players, Cambridge Concentus, Grand Harmonie, The Berry Collective, DeSota Baroque (Sarasota FL), and the Bach Babes (Milwaukee WI). She is the founder of Arreaux Strings - an event music service, arranges music for strings, teaches Baroque and modern cello along with other instruments of the violin family, and coaches chamber music at Harvard’s Mather House. Rebecca can occasionally be heard on viola da gamba, violin, baroque and modern viola, and bass.
Performing in both early and modern classical genres, she received a Graduate Performance Diploma in Early Music from the Longy School of Music as a student of Phoebe Carrai, holds a Masters Degree and Performance Certificate in Chamber Music from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's Institute of Chamber Music, and a Bachelor of Music degree from Rutgers University. You can find her original pop arrangements at sheetmusicplus.com and visit Arreaux Strings at arreauxstrings.com.
Also a furious knitter, Rebecca whips up tiny projects whenever possible that can be seen at You’ve Been R’ed. (youvebeenr-ed.weebly.com arr!)