2007 - 2008 Series

Midtown Concerts: 
October 2007  |  November 2007   |  December 2007  |  January 2008  |  February 2008
March 2008  |  April 2008  |  May 2008

December 2007

December 5
Repast
The Intimate Corelli

Baroque violinist Amelia Roosevelt is featured in this program of sonatas from Arcangelo Corelli's opus 5. The New York Times has praised Roosevelt for her "consistently fine form."

Acclaimed by the New York Times for its "energy and clarity" and "robust" playing, Repast presents compelling virtuosic performances of music from the 17th and 18th centuries. Founded in New York City in 2003, the period-instrument ensemble was a finalist in the Early Music America/Naxos Recording Competition that same year. Since then the group has performed in the New York Early Music Celebration, the Lyceum concert series, the Brooklyn Friends Meeting House, Midtown Concerts, and the Staller Center for the Arts. Repast currently presents a concert series at Baruch Performing Arts Center.

As part of its educational outreach mission, Repast has given a lecture-demonstration at Columbia University and a workshop at the Brooklyn Queens Conservatory of Music. Repast  also presents programs to Baruch College students.

The core of the ensemble, consisting of baroque violin, theorbo, and harpsichord, is frequently expanded by the addition of baroque cello, viola da gamba, baroque flute, recorder, violins, viola, or voice.
 

December 12
Continuo Collective
English Masques

The New York Continuo Collective, founded to explore the art of continuo in vocal music of the early Italian Baroque, now turns their attention to the delightful masque-music of Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Grant Herreid will lead the ensemble.

The New York Continuo Collective began in 1998 as a series of informal meetings of members of the Mannes Collegium Musicum who sought to learn more about the art of continuo (the improvisation of accompaniments from figured bass) in the music of the early Baroque. The group has evolved into an ongoing workshop numbering more than thirty active participants, including both singers and instrumentalists. The Collective conducts weekly sessions in performance practice, examining rhetoric of text, gesture, ornamentation, and phrasing to create a common language for realizing this highly improvised music. In addition, the Collective has offered a number of shorter, more specialized classes; masterclasses by Stephen Stubbs, Elizabeth Kenny, Paula Chateauneuf, Karl-Ernst Schroeder, Andrew Lawrence-King and Judith Malafronte; and spring baroque opera workshops. While not a performing group per se, performance is an integral part of the Continuo Collective's mission. Past performances have included appearances with ARTEK, the Mannes Collegium, Polyhymnia, and the New York Historical Dance Company. The Collective is a regular participant on the Midtown Concerts series, presenting two concerts a year. They have appeared at the biennial Boston Early Music Festival as part of the Fringe Concert series since 2003, most recently with Francesca Caccini's La Liberazione di Ruggiero in 2007.

Faculty: Grant Herreid, Patrick O'Brien, Paul Shipper, Jennifer Griesbach, Christa Patton, Charles Weaver. Administrative Director: Tony Elitcher. Contact the Continuo Collective at (718) 636-5706, ContinuoNY@aol.com , or www.continuony.org .
 

December 19
Trefoil
Medieval Nativity Music

Marcia Young, Drew Minter, and Mark Rimple (lute, psaltery, voices, and medieval harps) reprise their concert of hauntingly beautiful and eloquent laude from 14th-century Italy, on the ancient themes of the Christmas season—Advent, Nativity, and Epiphany. Included are mass movements, narrative poems, preaching or moral tunes, and songs of praise and prayer.

Trefoil is a trio of singer-instrumentalists long active in early music, with experience in such ensembles as Concert Royal, Les Arts Florissants, New York's Ensemble for Early Music, Pomerium, Clarion Music society, Piffaro, My Lord Chamberlain's Consort, and other groups. The trio debuted in New York and Philadelphia early in 2000 with a program of 14th-century French ars subtilior song. The Philadelphia Inquirer tagged the performers as "a hearty trio of medieval music specialists" and their work as "an intricate, enigmatic vocal art." TREFOIL has appeared in concerts and master classes at The Cloisters, Temple University, Vassar College, Middlebury College, the Vermont Millennium Arts Festival, the Museum Series of Providence, Boston College, the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, NH, the Neighborhood Music School in New Haven, the 2002 Amherst Early Music Festival, the New York Early Music Celebration, the Washington D.C. Early Music Festival, and the 37th International Congress on Medieval Studies at the University of Western Michigan at Kalamazoo. The trio has also made joint appearances with Piffaro, the Renaissance Band in Philadelphia, the Folger Concert in Washington, D.C. and The Newberry Consort in Chicago, Illinois.
 

December 26
My Lord Chamberlain's Consort
"To Drive the Cold Winter Away"

My Lord Chamberlain's Consort celebrates the warmth and beauty of the Winter Solstice with seasonal song from the courts of Renaissance England, arranged for lute, harp, viol, cittern, and voices.

My Lord Chamberlain's Consort was formed in 1997 to present a complete performance of John Dowland's landmark First Book of Songs or Ayres in its 400th anniversary year. The New York Times called the Consort "a whimsically named new grouping of distinguished early music practitioners. . . . excellent . . . thrilling . . . noble and expressive." Dowland's First Book carries a dedication to Sir George Carey, the Queen's Lord Chamberlain, from whom MLCC takes its name. Carey also was a patron of William Shakespeare's acting troupe, The Lord Chamberlain's Men.

The group's members have appeared with many of the world's leading early music ensembles, including Les Arts Florissants, Hesperus, Sequentia, Pomerium, ARTEK, New York's Ensemble for Early Music, and the Folger, Newberry, and Waverley Consorts. MLCC has won acclaim for its refined approach to ensemble singing, its entertaining approach to the Elizabethan repertoire, and the variety and originality of its vocal and instrumental arrangements.My Lord Chamberlain's Consort presents a new program each fall at its home venue in New York, the Church of St. Luke in the Fields. In the spring of 2001 the Consort made a successful tour of the American Southwest, with concerts in Phoenix, Tucson, Los Angeles, and San Diego. MLCC has since made a number of appearances at The Cloisters and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as the Renaissance and Baroque Society of Pittsburgh; Columbus Early Music Society; St. Andrew's Music Society at Madison Avenue Presbyterian, New York; and the George Bishop Lane Series in Burlington, Vermont. The Consort has also been heard live over Vermont Public Radio and New York Public Radio, WNYC.