Artists

About the Artists

Director Gwendolyn Toth is one of only a few American conductors of historical performance ensembles and orchestras. Currently, she is the director and founder of New York City's virtuoso period instrument ensemble, ARTEK. Ms. Toth has also conducted at Sadler's Wells Theater in London with the Mark Morris Dance Group; the Skylight Theater in Milwaukee; Kaye Playhouse, Merkin Hall, and BAM in New York City, and for the German Radio Broadcasting system. She is recognized as an outstanding performer on early keyboard instruments, performing in early music festivals in Boston, Utrecht, Holland; and the Czech Republic and on radio networks in Holland, Germany, France, and America's National Public Radio. Her discography includes a CD of Bach's Goldberg Variations on the lautenwerk, and a CD of organ works by Heinrich Scheidemann on the meantone organ in Zeerijp, Holland. In contemporary music, Ms. Toth has worked and recorded with eminent composer/performers such as John Cage, Rhys Chatham, Petr Kotik, Dave Soldier, Louis Andriessen, and Elliot Sharp at BAM Next Wave Festival, The Kitchen, Bang on a Can Festival, Cage Nachttage in Köln, and others.

Jessica Tranzillo, soprano, has gained critical acclaim in the classical concert field in performances of opera and early music in recent years. She has appeared with ARTEK in Monteverdi's Vespers of 1610, Orfeo , and L'Incoronazione di Poppea, Purcell's Fairy Queen, Handel's Messiah, Bach's St. John's Passion and Magnificat, Mozart's Requiem, and Handel's Dixit Dominus. She has toured with ARTEK to the Boston Early Music Festival, receiving rave reviews, and in Europe, where she sang in early music festivals in Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, Switzerland and the Netherlands. She can currently be heard on ARTEK's acclaimed CD recording of Monteverdi's opera, Orfeo, on the Lyrichord Early Music Series label, and on the Zefiro label "I Don't Want to Love" and the recently released "Organ Music of Scheidemann" on which she sings the introductory chants. Ms. Tranzillo has been soloist with the Long Island Choral Society and Orchestra for the past seven seasons, where she has been the soloist in Poulenc's Gloria, Handel's Samson, Mozart's Requiem and Solemn Vespers, Haydn's Lord Nelson Mass, and most recently the Dvorak Stabat Mater.

Barbara Hollinshead, mezzo-soprano, has been a member of ARTEK since 1995. A popular soloist in the Washington, DC area, the Washington Post has described her singing as "precise in pitch, varied in color as the occasion requires, agile in the ornaments intrinsic to baroque music and deeply expressive of intense, conflicting emotions." She has appeared with many of the finest early music groups in eastern North America including Tafelmusik, Chatham Baroque, and the Four Nations Ensemble, and she is a regular guest artist with the Folger Consort, Opera Lafayette, and the Washington Bach Consort. She has also traveled with the Washington Bach Consort on a two-week tour of Germany, performing at a festival in Thuringia and at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig. Ms. Hollinshead rounds out her musical contributions with educational endeavors as a professor of voice at American University and a cast member in the Washington Bach Consort's much-celebrated program "Bach to School," which brings Bach's music to elementary school students. When not singing, you can find her listening to her sons sing evensong services and judging diving competitions.

Among the world's premiere countertenors, Drew Minter has appeared in leading roles with the opera companies of Brussels, Toulouse, Boston, Washington, Santa Fe, BAM, Wolf Trap, Glimmerglass, Nice, and Marseilles, as well as Skylight Opera, Opera/Omaha, and the Berkshire Opera Festival, and at the Halle, Karlsruhe, Maryland and Göttingen Handel festivals. Mr. Minter is a founding member of the Newberry Consort and performs regularly with My Lord Chamberlain's Consort, ARTEK, and Folger Consort. With Trefoil, he performs 14^th century music from original notation as a singer and instrumentalist. Mr. Minter is represented by over 40 recordings on Harmonia Mundi, Decca/London, Newport Classics, Lyrichord, and Hungaroton. Mr. Minter is also a lauded opera director; this past year he directed productions of Mozart's Cosi fan tutte for Boston's Opera Aperta, Pauline Viardot's Cendrillon for the Boston University Opera Institute, and Purcell's Fairy Queen at Vassar College. In addition to master classes and workshops at Amherst Early Music and the San Francisco Early Music Workshops, he teaches on the voice faculties of Vassar and Smith Colleges.

Hailed for his "voice of liquid warmth and easy stage presence" tenor Philip Anderson made a Carnegie Hall debut in December 2002 singing Handel's Messiah with Masterworks Chorus and Orchestra. Recent engagements include the Evangelist in Bach's Saint John Passion , Dvorak's Stabat Mater, Monteverdi's Vespers of 1610, and Rossini's Petite Messe Solennelle. He has been a soloist with New York Collegium, Mark Morris Dance Group, Orchestra of St. Luke's, Chatham Baroque, Lionheart, and Piffaro. Mr. Anderson received critical acclaim across the United States and Canada for his performance in the title role of The Play of Daniel with New York's Ensemble for Early Music. In Europe he has sung at the Tage Alter Musik Festival in Regensburg and in Scarlatti's first opera Gli Equivoci nel Sembiante at the Festival Scarlatti in Palermo. Mr. Anderson is a founding member of My Lord Chamberlain's Consort, an ensemble which specializes in Elizabethan lute songs. On CD he has recorded British parlor songs, madrigals of Monteverdi with ARTEK, and John Dowland's First Book of Songs with My Lord Chamberlain's Consort.

Michael Brown, tenor, started musical life listening to classical and show music via phonograph and radio. After receiving first music lessons from his father and a stint as a chorister in Bethlehem PA, he earned music degrees from The Manhattan School of Music and Mannes College of Music. He has been a member of ARTEK since the 1992 production of Orfeo where he performed the role of Apollo, and he has toured extensively with ARTEK and the Mark Morris Dance Group singing madrigals of Monteverdi. He has sung Haydn and Mozart operas with the Connecticut Early Music Festival, Mozart's C minor Mass with the American Bach Soloists, and in the Glimmerglass production of Coronation of Poppea at BAM. Recent highlights include performances of Schubert's Winterreise with Harvey Burgett and the music of contemporaries Wendy Griffiths and Chris Berg. He and his wife soprano Phyllis Clark have concertized and taught workshops together in Japan and have successfully assembled 15 pieces of IKEA furniture.

Peter Becker, bass-baritone, began his musical training in Bombay, India at the Kinnara School of Music, where he studied tablas at the feet of Ravi Shankar. He began his professional singing career in Chevy Chase, MD as a paid boy soprano, thereby supplementing the income from his paper route. Since then he has performed on stages throughout the USA, Europe, Asia, and South America in repertoire ranging from medieval to contemporary. Theater credits include performances with the Canadian Opera Company, Glimmerglass Opera, Teatro Opera di Roma, the New York Shakespeare Festival, the 20th Century Consort, the Metropolitan Opera Education Program, the Eugene O'Neil Center, and New York's Lyric Theater. He has been a featured guest artist with Tafelmusik, the Smithsonian Chamber Players, Magnificat, the Newberry Consort, and at a number of festivals including Spoleto, Caramoor, Aldeburgh, Utrecht, Hong Kong, Jerusalem, and Lille. He has recorded for the Decca-London, New Albion, Dorian and Bard labels.

Robert Mealy has been praised for his "imagination, taste, subtlety, and daring" (Boston Globe) on a wide variety of historical strings; the New Yorker recently described him as "New York's world-class early music violinist." He has recorded over 50 CDs of early music on most major labels, ranging from Hildegard of Bingen with Sequentia, to Renaissance consorts with the Boston Camerata, to Rameau operas with Les Arts Florissants. Mr. Mealy has appeared at international music festivals from Berkeley to Belgrade, and from Melbourne to Versailles. As well as playing with ARTEK, he is a frequent leader and soloist with the New York Collegium and Early Music New York, and he was recently appointed concertmaster of the acclaimed Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra. He is a member of the medieval ensemble Fortune's Wheel, the Renaissance violin band the King's Noyse, and the 17th-c. ensemble Spiritus. Mr. Mealy recently received Early Music America's Binkley Award for his work directing both the Yale Collegium Players and the Harvard Baroque Chamber Orchestra.

Lisa Terry, specialist on viola da gamba and early cello, brings an expressive and inspiring artistry to her performances with ARTEK and Parthenia. She has performed with New York City Opera, Juilliard Opera Orchestra, Aspen Opera Theater Center, Orchestra of St. Lukes, Concert Royal, New York Collegium, American Classical Orchestra, Four Nations Ensemble, Santa Fe Pro Musica and Chicago Opera Theatre. She earned her degree in cello performance from Memphis State University and continued her studies in New York with Richard Taruskin, viol, and Harry Wimmer, cello. Ms. Terry appears to great acclaim as soloist in the Passions of J.S. Bach with orchestras throughout the Northeast, notably under the batons of Robert Shaw and Lyndon Woodside in Carnegie Hall, in the Jonathan Miller staged performances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and with the New York Collegium under the direction of Andrew Parrot. Ms. Terry teaches early music classes at the French-American Conservatory of Music in Manhattan, and was formerly viol instructor at Columbia University and in the Historical Performance Program at SUNY Purchase. She has recorded for Lyrichord, MHS, Newport Classics, Zefiro and Museovich Productions.

Grant Herreid is a versatile musician/director/teacher on the early music scene. As a multi-instrumentalist and singer he performs frequently with Hesperus, Piffaro, My Lord Chamberland's Consort and the Folger Consort, and New York City Opera, and this year he will make his debut with Tafelmusik and the Newbury Consort. A noted early music educator, Grant conducts classes in Renaissance music and 17th century song at Mannes College of Music in New York, and directs the New York Continuo Collective. He has created and directed several theatrical early music shows, but mostly he devotes his time to exploring the esoteric unwritten traditions of early music with the groups Ex Umbris and Visceral Reaction. He has recorded for Archiv, Dorian, Lyrichord, Musical Heritage Society, Newport Classics and others.

Lutenist Daniel Swenberg concentrates on Renaissance and baroque performance practices, with special devotion to the role of basso-continuo playing and the instruments central to its practice: the theorbo/chitaronne, renaissance and baroque lutes, early guitars, and the gallizona/callichon. Among the ensembles in which he performs are: ARTEK, Rebel, Visceral Reaction, The New York Collegium, The Metropolitan Opera, Staatstheater Stuttgart, New York City Opera, the Mark Morris Dance Group, Stadtstheater Klagenfurt, Tafelmusik, Opera Atelier, Les Violons du Roy, Piffaro, Spiritus Collective, and Lizzy and the Theorboys. He has received awards from the Belgian American Educational Foundation (2000) for a study of 18th-century chamber music for the lute, and a Fulbright Scholarship (1997) to study in Bremen, Germany with Stephen Stubbs and Andrew Lawrence King, at the Hochschule fuer Kuenste. He studied previously with Pat O'Brien at Mannes College of Music (New York City), receiving a Masters Degree in Historical Performance-Lute. Prior to his concentration on lutes, he studied Musicology at Washington University (St. Louis) and received a B.M. in classical guitar from the North Carolina School of the Arts.

Christa Patton has served as baroque harpist most recently with the Seattle Baroque Orchestra, ARTEK, the New York City Opera's production of Monteverdi's Ulisse at Lincoln Center and The Wolf Trap Opera Company's production of Monteverdi's L'Incoronazione di Poppea in Washington DC. As a multi-instrumentalist Christa has performed in the US, Europe and Japan with New York's Ensemble for Early Music since 1993 and has recorded Istampitta on the Lyrichord label. She has been a regular guest with Piffaro and appears on their latest compact disc, Trionfo d'Amore e della Morte, on Dorian Records. Ms. Patton has also performed and recorded with Ex Umbris and can be heard on their compact disk entitled Chacona. In Milan, Italy Christa has performed with with the Laboratorio permanente sulla Musica vocale del XVII secolo at the Palazzo Reale in Milan, the Barbarini Palace in Rome and at the Tempio dell'Incoronata in Lodi under the direction of Roberto Gini. A recipient of the prestigious Fulbright scholarship, Christa studied the Italian baroque harp at the Civica Scuola di Musica in Milan with historical harp specialist Mara Galassi.

Charles Weaver, lute, theorbo, baroque guitar, and voice, performs as a member of New York–based ensembles ARTEK, Repast, and Ensemble Viscera. He has also appeared in concert with Hesperus, Piffaro, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, and the Yale Schola Cantorum. With his duo partner, soprano Elizabeth Baber, he has created programs of Renaissance song praised for their “imagination in programming.” The Washington Post has described his performances as “captivating” and “splendid.” He is on the faculty of the New York Continuo Collective, a semi-professional workshop that explores the courtly tradition of reciting Italian poetry to the lute and its relation to early opera. Last summer, he taught at the Western Wind choral workshop and was assistant music director of the Amherst Early Music Festival's Theater Project. This season will include recordings with Early Music New York and the Dryden Ensemble, concerts with Parthenia and the Yale Early Opera Initiative, and a medieval mystery play with the Folger Consort.