2007 – 2008 Season

September 2007  |  October 2007  |  November 2007  |  December 2007
January 2008  |  February 2008  |  March 2008  |  April 2008  |  May 2008

May 7
Amy Bartram & Dongsok Shin
Mozart Lieder
Soprano Amy Bartram presents a program of Mozart's beautiful German lieder, accompanied by Dongsok Shin, who will play on a copy of Mozart's own fortepiano by Anton Walter.

Amy Bartram is a frequent soloist in opera and oratorio in concerts in and around NYC. In 2007, she was the soloist in Mozart's Coronation Mass at the Church of the Transfiguration, where she sang Josabeth in Handel's Athalia in 2006. She sings with many ensembles, including the Clarion Music Society and the Vox Vocal Ensemble. For several years she appeared in broadcast concerts with the choir of Trinity Church, Wall Street and REBEL baroque orchestra, performing solos in works by Handel, Mozart, and Purcell. A specialist in early music, she gives recitals of 17th-century lute songs with lutenist Ekko Jennings and is the artistic director of Machicoti, a Medieval Ensemble.
Dongsok Shin has played the piano from the age of four, but has specialized exclusively on early keyboard instruments since the 1980s. Much in demand as a soloist and continuo player, he has appeared with ARTEK, Concert Royal, Mark Morris Dance Group, New York Collegium, New York Philharmonic, and New York's Grande Bande. He has toured throughout North America, Europe, and Mexico, has been heard on many radio broadcasts, and has recorded for Lyrichord, Newport Classic, Helicon, ATMA Classique, and Dorian Recordings. Mr. Shin has been a member of REBEL since 1997. In his spare time, he tunes and maintains harpsichords in the New York area (he is the harpsichord technician for the Metropolitan Opera), and is well known as a recording engineer, producer, and editor of numerous early music recordings. He is married to Gwendolyn Toth, director of ARTEK and also an early keyboard player, and is the proud father of Samantha, Linnea, and Adrian. Today he plays a fortepiano that is a copy made in 1981 by Philip Belt of Mozart's own Anton Walter fortepiano now in Salzburg.

May 14
New York Continuo Collective
English Opera
The singers and instrumentalists of the New York Continuo Collective, led by Grant Herreid, will perform selections from their spring baroque opera workshop, which draws on the musical wealth of late 17th-century England. Excerpts from John Blow's Venus and Adonis will be featured.

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, Leah Nelson, Patrick O'Brien, Paul Shipper, Charles Weaver. Administrative Director: Tony Elitcher. Contact the Continuo Collective at (718) 636-5706, ContinuoNY@aol.com, or www.continuony.org.

May 21
ARTEK
Cantatas of Francesco Conti
Francesco Bartolomeo Conti (1681–1732) was both an accomplished theorbo player and an important opera composer in the Viennese court. Members of ARTEK will perform a selection of Conti's arias and cantatas, featuring soprano Jessica Tranzillo with obbligato lute, baroque flute and chalumeau, a baroque predecessor of the clarinet.

This is the final concert of our 2007–2008 season. Please join us again in September when the new season of concerts begins! To be added to our email list for concert announcements, please click here.