Frances Fitch

Frances Conover Fitch has performed extensively in North America and Europe, and recorded for Swiss, German, Dutch, and French National Radio as well as for the BBC and NPR. Her ground-breaking ensemble, Concerto Castello, won critical acclaim as well an Honorable Mention in the Deutsche Schallplatten Preis of 1983. A particularly sensitive and inventive continuo player, she has worked and played with Spiritus Collective, Cantata Singers, Emmanuel Music, Aston Magna, Boston Cecilia, Handel and Haydn Society, Concerto Palatino, and the Boston Camerata, among others. Ms. Fitch has participated in major music festivals, including the Gilmore Festival, the Festival d'Art Lyrique/Aix-en-Provence, Pepsico Summerfare, Tanglewood, Boston Early Music Festival, Tage Alter Musik (Regensburg), the Castle Hill Festival and the Festival de Musica Antigua in Mexico City, where she also gave master classes at the National Conservatory. She has over twenty solo and ensemble recordings on the EMI-Reflexe, Titanic, Harmonia Mundi, Nonesuch, Centaur, Koch International and Wild Boar labels. Ms. Fitch teaches at Tufts University and The England Conservatory of Music and for many years was Chair of the Early Music Department at the Longy School of Music, teaching harpsichord, organ, chamber music, figured bass improvisation and bibliographic research. She has also served on the faculties of Wellesley College and the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, and recently completed a semester as Guest Professor in Performing Arts at Ferris University in Yokohama, Japan. Ms. Fitch has degrees from Bard College and New England Conservatory, and pursued studies with Gustav Leonhardt and Veronika Hampe at the Sweelinck Conservatorium in Amsterdam. Her playing has been praised as “perceptive”, “stylish” and “spectacular”, and noted for its “precision and delicacy of wit”.

http://www.francesconoverfitch.com/

Early Music Week at Pinewoods

Ellen Delahanty

Ellen Delahanty has been praised in the international press as a “wonderfully clear soprano” and “a singer of great charm and perfect diction”. She studied voice with the renowned English voice teacher Jessica Cash in London. At the Mannes College of Music in New York she graduated with a Masters Degree in recorder and early music. She then furthered her recorder studies with distinction at the conservatories of Utrecht, Leuven and Antwerpen. In addition to her solo career, she is a member of medieval ensemble Quadrivium, and performs renaissance and baroque repertoire with the ensemble Sospiri Ardenti. With both ensembles she has recorded CDs for Kattenberg Recordings. She is a regular guest on several early music festivals in Europe and America. For many years while living in NY, Ellen was active playing recorder for English Country Dance. She was a member of the band Musical Cheers, playing weekly for Fried Herman and Christine Helwig in Westchester. She performed regularly for dances in New York City, including several Playford Balls in NYC, Westchester, and up and down the East Coast. Since 1983, Ellen has resided in Antwerp, Belgium. She is active as a performer and teacher of Early Music. She also maintains her Country Dance connection – performing regularly for dances taught by Philippe Callens and Frieda Van Vlaenderen. Since 2008 she has taught the course Folk Music at the Music Academy of Borgerhout, Antwerp. In addition to exploring Irish and American folk music as part of this course, she has organized several English Dance evenings (dances led by Philippe Callens), coaching her students in the art of playing for dancing.

http://www.ellendelahanty.com/

Early Music Week at Pinewoods

Eric Haas

Eric Haas has taught at New England Conservatory, Tufts University and Wheaton College, as well as numerous early music workshops, including Amherst Early Music, the Long Island Recorder Festival and the Mideast Workshop. Mr. Haas is well known for his many transcriptions and editions for recorder. He performs on recorder and early flutes with lutenist Chris Henriksen as Pentimento and with the Renaissance flute consort Travessada. He served for many years as Music Director of the Boston Recorder Society and manages the retail division of the von Huene Workshop, Inc.

Early Music Week at Pinewoods

Jane Hershey

Jane Hershey began her training in the Boston area, with Gian Silbiger (viol) and Marleen Montgomery (recorder.) She continued her studies at The Hague Conservatory, where she studied with Frans Brueggen, and Sigiswald and Wieland Kuijken. For some time, she was a member of the Boston Camerata, performing, recording and touring in the U.S. and Europe. She has played both violone and viola da gamba with Arcadia Players of Western Massachusetts since its founding in 1986. As a player of both of these instruments, she has performed with many ensembles and in festivals, such as Monadnock Music, Hesperus, Emmanuel Music, the Santa Fe Baroque Orchestra, Smithsonian Chamber Orchestra and Aston Magna. Her viol playing is well known to Boston audiences through her many performances with Laura Jeppesen in Trio Charivary, and in the Carthage Consort of Viols. Their performances, with Emily Walhout, of music from the court of Henry VIII, for the Cambridge Society for Early Music, were applauded in a Jan. 2010 Boston Musical Intelligencer review: "… their deft and subtle playing spread smiles and shared delight among the audience." The Carthage Consort also performed in a 2005 production of Marlowe's Dido, Queen of Carthage at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge. As a soloist on the viol, Ms. Hershey can be heard on a 2005 Centaur release of music by E. Jacquet de la Guerre, with Frances Fitch and friends. An active teacher, Ms. Hershey accepts private students of all ages of the Powers Music School, where she also coaches viol consort classes. At The Longy School of Music, she teaches in both the Conservatory (M.Mus.) and Community Programs divisions; in addition, she has directed the Tufts University Early Music Ensemble since 1995. A frequent coach for the VDGSA Annual Conclave and an active member of the New England chapter, Ms. Hershey currently serves on the Board of the Viola da Gamba Society of America.

Early Music Week at Pinewoods

Scott Higgs

Scott Higgs has been calling and composing English and contra dances for over 25 years -- delighting novices and experts alike. From Seattle to Antwerp, dancers praise Scott's engaging programs, dynamic presentation, and emphasis on fun. His business card says it all: Playful, spirited, elegant, zesty, joyful contra, English, morris, and couple dancing.

http://www.scotthiggs.com

English & American Dance Week at Pinewoods

Joan Kimball

Joan Kimball, artistic co-director and a founding member of Piffaro, The Renaissance Band, has toured and concertized with the ensemble throughout the U.S., Europe, and parts of South America, and has performed with many of the leading early music artists and ensembles in this country. She gave full time to early music performance in 1980 after a number of years as an educator, and still treasures her work with students of all ages. She teaches recorder and early winds to children and adults and is on the music faculty of The Philadelphia School, an elementary and middle school, where she has a full roster of private recorder students and recorder ensembles. Joan also organizes Piffaro’s educational programs, initiated a residency in a Philadelphia School district elementary school where she taught recorder and percussion to third grade classes, and plans special outreach projects built around Piffaro’s concert series. In addition, she collaborates with instrument maker Joel Robinson of New York City on the construction of Medieval and Renaissance bagpipes and is a maker of double reeds for Renaissance shawms, dulcians and capped winds. Joan teaches bagpipe, recorder and double reed classes at summer music workshops and festivals. In addition to her recordings with Piffaro she can also be heard on Vanguard Classical, Eudora and Vox Amadeus.

http://www.piffaro.com/

Early Music Week at Pinewoods

Judith Linsenberg

Judith Linsenberg, recorder, is one of the leading exponents of the recorder in the United States and has been acclaimed for her "virtuosity," "expressivity," "fearless playing, and combination of “masterly control with risk-taking spontaneity." She has performed extensively throughout the U.S. and Europe, including solo appearances at the Hollywood Bowl and Lincoln Center; and has been featured with such leading American ensembles as the San Francisco Symphony, the San Francisco and Los Angeles Operas, the Oregon Symphony, LA Chamber Orchestra, Philharmonia Baroque, American Bach Soloists, the Portland and Seattle Baroque Orchestras, the Oregon and Carmel Bach Festivals, Musica Angelica of Los Angeles, and others. She is the winner of national performance awards, and has premiered several pieces for the recorder. Judy is Artistic Director of the Baroque ensemble, Musica Pacifica, whose performances and nine recordings on the Virgin Classics, Dorian, and Solimar labels have received international acclaim, and have caused the ensemble to be described by the press as "some of the finest baroque musicians in America" (American Record Guide) and “among the best in the world" (Alte Musik Aktuell). Judy has also recorded for harmonia mundi usa, Koch International, Reference Recordings, Musical Heritage Society, Drag City Records and Hännsler Classics. A Fulbright scholar to Austria, she was awarded the Soloist Diploma with Highest Honors from the Vienna Academy of Music. She is a summa cum laude graduate of Princeton University, holds a doctorate in early music from Stanford University, and has been a visiting professor at the Vienna Conservatory and Indiana University’s Early Music Institute in Bloomington.

http://www.linsenberg.com/  www.musicapacifica.org

Early Music Week at Pinewoods

Larry Lipkis

Larry Lipkis is a Professor of Music and Composer-in-Residence at Moravian College, where he directs the early music ensembles at the college and also teaches composition. Since 1986, Larry has performed and recorded with the Baltimore Consort, an internationally acclaimed early music ensemble specializing in popular music of Shakespeare’s time. This fall, the group will release its fifteenth CD—a collection of Renaissance Christmas music. Their previous release, entitled Adio España, focused on music from the Iberian Peninsula, circa 1500. Larry has composed over eighty works for chamber ensembles, choir, and orchestra. His bassoon concerto Pierrot, which was premiered by the Houston Symphony, marked the completion of a trilogy of concerti based on characters from the Commedia dell’Arte. Scaramouche for cello and orchestra was recorded by Carter Brey and the Lehigh Valley Chamber Orchestra on the Koch International label. Harlequin for bass trombone and orchestra was premiered by Jeffrey Reynolds and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Larry is a music director for the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival and the Unitarian Universalist Church of the Lehigh Valley, and serves on the Board of Managers of the Bach Choir of Bethlehem. He often leads workshops in both recorder and viola da gamba performance practice, and gives presentations on musical rhetoric and composition. Last month, he lectured on the topic of Bach’s Mass in B Minor at a National Endowment for the Humanities Institute in Leipzig, Germany.

http://www.larrylipkis.com

Early Music Week at Pinewoods

Sarah Mead

Sarah Mead first encountered early music in high school, when she danced and sang as Queen Elizabeth in a production led by Ingrid Brainard. After studying music history and choral conducting at Yale, she pursued graduate study in early music at Stanford both as a viol player and a choral conductor. She and her spouse were musicians at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival before moving east in 1979. She began teaching viols at Brandeis University in 1982, and is now Associate Professor of the Practice there, directing the Early Music Ensemble, teaching music history, and serving as a frequent guest choral conductor. In 2007 Early Music America recognized her with the Thomas Binkley Award for Outstanding Achievement by a Collegium Director. Her handbook on 16th-century music theory is a staple in performance practice programs, and she is recognized throughout North America as a clinician in historical performance. She has taught early music ensembles at Tufts & Northeastern Universities in the Boston area, as well as at Trinity College of Music in London, and has taught theory & performance practice in the graduate program in early music at Longy School of Music in Cambridge. She has been a guest International Tutor for workshops in Australia and Great Britain. Formerly Program Director for Early Music Week at Pinewoods, she now directs the annual Conclave of the Viola da Gamba Society of America. She serves on the boards of the VdGSA, Early Music America, and Pinewoods Camp, Inc.

www.nb-viols.org

Early Music Week at Pinewoods

Daphna Mor

Daphna Mor has performed throughout Europe and the U.S. as a soloist and as an ensemble player. Her appearances include solo recitals in Croatia, Germany and Switzerland; Recitals at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Trinity Church, New York; Soloist with The New York Collegium; Soloist with New York Early Music Ensemble; Soloist at Carnegie Hall with Little Orchestra Society, Orchestra member with the New York Philharmonic; City Opera, Mostly Mozart. Lincoln Center; Piffaro- The Renaissance Band and Repast. Awards include First Prize in Settimane Musicali di Lugano Solo Competition and two-time winner of The Boston Conservatory Concerto Competition. Ms. Mor received her Bachelor of Music degree from The Boston Conservatory with highest honors as Valedictorian of the class of 2000. Ms. Mor acts as musician to the education department of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. She is a frequent teacher in early music workshops around the U.S. Ms. Mor is frequently involved in performing of contemporary music. This season she was featured as a soloist with The Metropolis Ensemble, performing the world premiere of Tears, Puffes, Jumps, and Galliard by David Bruce. In 2009 she joined St Luke’s Orchestra to perform the NY premiere of The Flowering Tree, composed and conducted by John Adams. Ms. Mor is an active World Music musician as well. Ms. Mor has appeared on such prestigious stages as Summer Stage, Central Park, NY; and in festivals all over the U.S., Canada, Poland, Italy, Spain, Germany, Slovenia, Austria, Greece and Israel. She appears on Sting’s New CD If On a Winter’s Night on the Deutsche Gramophone label and is a musician at residence at B’nai Jeshurun Synagogue in New York City.

http://www.daphnamor.com

Early Music Week at Pinewoods

Dorothy Olsson

Dorothy J. Olsson has given numerous workshops in historical dance and has choreographed for and/or performed with Piffaro, the Folger Consort, Western Wind Vocal Ensemble, SUNY Stony Brook, Mannes Camerata, Wake Forest University and Princeton University. Dorothy directs and teaches at the Historical Dance Program at the Amherst Early Music Festival where she has directed several historical theatrical productions, and choreographed for more than thirty theatre projects or operas. Dorothy received her B. M. in Music Education, major in Bassoon, from the Crane School of Music (State University College at Potsdam, NY), and received her Master of Music in Musicology from Manhattan School of Music. She completed her Ph.D. in Performance Studies at New York University, with a dissertation on early twentieth-century dance. She was an Assistant Professor of Dance Education at New York University for ten years. Dr. Olsson has co-authored seven books on historical dance, including Terrstepery, A Primer for Historical Dance. Her article on Seventeenth-Century Dance appears in A Performer’s Guide to Seventeenth-Century Music (ed. Stewart Carter, Schirmer Books). She is the Founder and Director of the New York Historical Dance Company. The company performed in October 2010 in Philadelphia for Piffaro’s 25th Anniversary Gala Celebration, The Royals’ Baptism & Ballet, along with Parthenia & The Blue Heron Renaissance Choir. In March 2010, Dorothy presented a lecture demonstration at The Metropolitan Museum of Art entitled The Jigge Is Up: Dance in Shakespeare’s Time; the musical ensemble Flying Forms provided musical accompaniment.

Early Music Week at Pinewoods

Pat Petersen

Pat Petersen is Director of Fortuna vocal ensemble (recorded on the Titanic label); she has also recorded music of Heinrich Isaac with the Amherst Festival Choir, and appears with the Solstice Assembly on three recordings. She is the assistant director of Amherst Early Music and director of the Collegium at U of North Carolina at Greensboro, as well as director and faculty member at many early music and dance workshops. She has been a guest soloist with Charleston (SC)  Symphony Orchestra. She regularly teaches and plays for English country dance at home in Durham, NC, and at early music workshops

Early Music Week at Pinewoods

Tim Rayborn

Tim Rayborn, an acclaimed multi-instrumentalist, plays dozens of musical instruments from medieval Europe, the Middle East, and the Balkans. In addition to solo work, he co-directs the medieval ensemble Cançonièr with Annette Bauer, performs with harpist Patrick Ball, and regularly works with Shira Kammen. Tim lived in the U.K. for seven years, and holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in Medieval Studies from the University of Leeds. He has toured in the U.S. and Europe (from Ireland to Turkey) extensively, performing at both the York and Beverley Early Music Festivals (U.K.), Alden Biesen Castle (Belgium), Bunyola (Majorca), and the Spitalfields Festival (London). He has given a number of performances for BBC in the U.K. and Channel Islands, toured in Canada and Australia, and worked with folk musicians in Marrakech and Istanbul. Recent concerts include the Renaissance and Baroque Society of Pittsburgh, the Indianapolis Early Music Festival, the Kalamazoo Medieval Congress, and World Arts West. Future performances include the MusicSources' 2012-13 season, the SFEMS concert series, and a 2013 tour of Australia. Tim has taught at the SFEMS Medieval & Renaissance workshop and Pinewoods Early Music week in Massachusetts, and has collaborated and performed with a number of early and world music professionals, including Ensemble Alcatraz, Margriet Tindemans, Sinfonye, Kitka, and many others. His music has been heard on BBC, NPR, and Harmonia radio. He has recorded to date on over 35 CDs for a number of labels, including Gaudeamus, Wild Boar, Magnatune, and Harmonia Mundi.

http://www.timrayborn.com

Early Music Week at Pinewoods

Mary Springfels

Mary Springfels is a highly respected an player of the viola da gamba, professor, and director of early music programs. She is a founding member and former director of the Newberry Consort and the former director of Northwestern University Early Music Ensemble. She has also played with the New York Pro Musica and the Waverly Consort as well as many other U.S. and European ensembles and is a founding member of the ensembles Elizabethan Enterprise and Les Filles de Sainte-Colombe. She has recorded for the Harmonia Mundi USA label as member of the Newberry Consort, as a soloist in a set of Stradella solo cantatas (with Christine Brandes and Paul O'Dette) and in solo instrumental works with recorder player Marion Verbruggen. She has also appeared on the Decca, Columbia, Nonesuch, and Titanic labels.

Early Music Week at Pinewoods

Viol Intensive at Early Music Week

Geert van Gele

Geert Van Gele has been a recorder artist for about three decades. As a beginning soloist, he explored the solo recorder repertoire accompanied by his father. During his conservatory years, he co-founded the world-famous Flanders' Recorder Quartet with which he concertized and recorded for ten years. Since 1995 he pursues a solo career, co-founding new and exciting ensembles like Sospiri Ardenti (staged baroque music: www.sospiri.com) and Quadrivium (medieval repertoire: www.quadrivium.net). Recently he started up his own record label Kattenberg Recordings (www.kattenberg.net).

http://www.geertvangele.com/

Early Music Week at Pinewoods

Peggy Vermilya

At six years of age, Peggy Vermilya whirled about her basement, listening to Peter and the Wolf, longing to be both a ballerina and an orchestra. She took lessons in tap, ballet, and acrobatics as a child; as a teenager she jitterbugged, strolled, twisted, and did things called “the mashed potatoes” and “the monkey.” Subsequently, international folk dance, contra and squares, and eventually English country dance claimed her heart. For more than a decade she has enjoyed teaching English country dance at the Neighborhood Music School in New Haven, being described by Marshall Barron as an “exciting,” “sensitive,” “inspiring” and “skillful” teacher. Peggy has attended many dance weeks at Pinewoods and has become a regular at Early Music Week where she began her love affair with the recorder and performances of early music. With her husband Peter she sails a Beetlecat named Poussette and a cruising catboat named Purcell.

Early Music Week at Pinewoods

Bob Wiemken

Bob Wiemken began his musical life as a French hornist many years ago and continued pursuing modern brass for some 18 years. Eventually, however, he became inexplicably enamored of the double-reed instruments and leapt at the chance to begin playing early reeds in the Collegium while a graduate student in Classics at the University of Pennsylvania. That began a long love affair with medieval through early Baroque double-reed instruments that has only crescendoed over the past 27 years of playing, exploring, studying, maintaining, servicing and, above all, making reeds for shawms, dulcians, bassoon, krumhorns and more, for himself and many others. As Artistic Co-Director of Piffaro, The Renaissance Band, he has performed worldwide, recorded extensively, built over 100 programs of Renaissance and early Baroque music and commissioned new works for early winds and chorus. He has been very fortunate to perform with many of the world’s leading early music ensembles, in festivals in North and South America and throughout Europe, and in spaces contemporary with the music that helped him define the role, sound and capabilities of double reeds in historic performance settings. He is an eager and well-appreciated teacher and lecturer in college and university settings, having directed the Early Music Ensembles at the Esther Boyer College of Music and Dance at Temple University for 20 years, bringing the world of early reeds to modern players. He also teaches regularly at festivals and workshops throughout the country. Currently, in addition to his performing, researching, recording and educating responsibilities, he continues to attempt to plumb the depths of early reed construction, design and technique in an effort to understand the mysteries of these glorious instruments.

http://www.piffaro.com/

Early Music Week at Pinewoods

Tom Zajac

Multi-instrumentalist, Tom Zajac is a member of the well-known Renaissance wind band Piffaro and is a frequent guest with the Folger Consort, Newberry Consort, Hesperus, Boston Camerata, Cançonièr, and the Texas Early Music Project among other U.S. ensembles. He has toured extensively, having appeared in concert series and festivals in Hong Kong, Guam, Australia, Israel, Colombia, Bolivia, Mexico, and throughout Europe and the U.S. He can be heard on over 40 recordings of everything from medieval dances to 21st-century chamber music. With his group Ex Umbris, he performed 14th-century music at the 5th Millennium Council event in the East Room of the Clinton White House and 18th-century music for the score of the Ric Burn's documentary on the history of New York. He's played hurdy gurdy for the American Ballet Theater, bagpipe for an internationally broadcast Gatorade commercial and serpent in a PDQ Bach piece live on Prairie Home Companion. He also performs on santur, miskal and zurna with the Boston-based Turkish ensemble, Dünya. This last August, he was invited by the Polish government to take part in a research visit to hear and meet Polish early music ensembles and wrote an article for the Winter 2012 issue of EMA magazine of his experiences there. Tom teaches at recorder and early music workshops throughout the US, and directs the Medieval & Renaissance week of the SFEMS workshops as well as the early music ensembles at Wellesley College near his home in Boston.

http://www.early-music.org/bios/tomzajac/

Early Music Week at Pinewoods