La Bernardinia Baroque Ensemble
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Rainer Beckmann performs with a large variety of early music ensembles in Philadelphia´s tri-state area. He is a member of La Bernardinia Baroque Ensemble and Vox Renaissance Consort. As featured soloist and guest musician, he has appeared with Tempesta di Mare Baroque Orchestra, Piffaro – The Renaissance Band, Camerata Ama Deus, Melomanie, Early Music New York, New Amsterdam Recorder Trio, Ridotto Ensemble, and Fuma Sacra.
Rainer is a first-prize winner at the Holland Open Recorder Festival Competition and the Performance Contest of the Dutch Concert Agency. As a founding member of Il Flauto Giocoso and the Landini Consort, he performed in Germany, the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Italy, and Israel. In Brazil, he taught recorder and music history at the State University of Ceará, and collaborated with the ensembles Ad Libitum and Syntagma that specialize in early music as well as Brazilian popular and traditional music.
Rainer is the director of the Greater Philadelphia Area Recorder Academy and the Lancaster Recorder Academy. He has been appointed music director of the Philadelphia Recorder Society in 2011. In addition, he continues to teach at Amherst Early Music and American Recorder Society workshops throughout the Northeast.
Rainer is a graduate of the Utrecht School of the Arts, Netherlands, where he studied recorder with Heiko ter Schegget, Baldrick Deerenberg, and Marion Verbruggen.
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Sarah Cunningham is recognized as one of the foremost viola da gambists worldwide. She was co-founder, with Monica Huggett, of Trio Sonnerie, with whom she recorded most of the important chamber music for violin and viol, and toured on four continents between 1982 and 1997. Her solo Cds were released on ASV and EMI/Virgin Classics, and she has appeared as recitalist from Helsinki to Vancouver. She has toured and recorded with John Eliot Gardiner, William Christie, Simon Rattle, Trevor Pinnock, Ton Koopman, Gustav Leonhardt, Roger Norrington; with viol consorts Fretwork, Phantasm, Hesperion XX, Parthenia; and medieval ensembles Sequentia and Virelai. She was professor of viola da gamba in Bremen, Germany from 1990-2000, and has taught at numerous summer academies and master classes worldwide. In recent years she has pursued interests in improvisation, dance, fiction and poetry writing, visual art, shamanic healing and ritual performance art. Sarah currently serves on the faculty of the Juilliard School in the Historical Performance Program.
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Donna Fournier plays viola da gamba and baroque cello with Triomphe de l'Amour and
Mélomanie and has been a guest artist with such groups as Tempesta
di Mare, Philomel, Brandywine Baroque, The Buxtehude Consort, The Chamber Orchestra of
Philadelphia, and The Philadelphia Classical Symphony. In a recent
review by the Philadelphia Inquirer, her solo work was
acclaimed as "poised, soulful ... [and] played with particular
depth." She specializes
in repertoire from the French Baroque period as well as works featuring
solo viola da gamba by J.S. Bach. She studied privately
with Laurence Dreyfus supplemented by master classes with John Hsu and
Wieland Kuijken. Donna is affiliate faculty at Temple University
where she coaches viol players from the Early Music Ensemble. She has
recorded Buxtehude cantatas on the PGM label, Telemann trio sonatas on
the Lyrichord label, Boismortier trio sonatas on the A Casa Discos
label, and new music for baroque ensemble on Meyers Music label. |
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Violinist Rebecca Harris performs on both modern and baroque violins. Rebecca joined Philadelphia’s baroque orchestra Tempesta di Mare in 2007, with whom she has recorded two discs for Chandos, and toured to Germany in 2011. In addition, Rebecca has performed with early music ensembles Seraphic Fire, the Handel Choir of Baltimore, and as a guest artist with Piffaro for their 2010 Philadelphia performance of Monteverdi’s Vespers in it’s 400th anniversary year. With the Bach Collegium of Philadelphia, she has been involved in creating innovative performances of J.S.Bach’s sacred and orchestral works. In 2011, Rebecca studied at the American Bach Soloists Academy in San Francisco.
Rebecca has been a Teaching Artist of the Philadelphia Orchestra since 2008. In this role, Rebecca has co-produced and performed Bridge Sessions at Philadelphia’s World Café Live, presented by LiveConnections.org, which creates interactive performances for children and special needs populations in the Philadelphia area.
Formerly a scholar of the Britten Pears Young Artists Program in Aldeburgh, UK, Rebecca was an assistant principal in the Britten Pears Orchestra, in which she worked with conductors Alexander Polianichko, Oliver Knussen and James MacMillan, and early music specialists Richard Egarr and Margaret Faultless. Rebecca has appeared as a chamber musician at the Cheltenham International Music Festival, Manchester’s Shostakovich Festival in 2006, and at major venues including St. John’s Smith Square and the Royal Opera House in London.
After early studies in the specialist music program at Wells Cathedral School, Rebecca graduated with honors and high distinction from the Royal Northern College of Music in her native United Kingdom. Alongside principal studies with Richard Ireland, Rebecca studied baroque and classical violin with Pauline Nobes and chamber music with Christopher Rowland. As a student, Rebecca was awarded prizes for solo and chamber music, and was the recipient of a major grant from the Joanna Scott Foundation in 2006.
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Praised for her “sparkle and humor, radiance and magnetism” and hailed for "a voice equally velvety up and down the registers", soprano Laura Heimes is widely regarded as an artist of great versatility, with repertoire ranging from the Renaissance to the 21st century. She has collaborated with many of the leading figures in early music, including Andrew Lawrence King, Julianne Baird, Tempeste di Mare, The King’s Noyse, Paul O’Dette, Chatham Baroque, Apollo’s Fire, The New York Collegium, The Publick Musick, Brandywine Baroque, Trinity Consort, and Piffaro – The Renaissance Band, a group with whom she has toured the United States. She has been heard at the Boston, Connecticut and Indianapolis Early Music Festivals, at the Oregon and Philadelphia Bach Festivals under the baton of Helmuth Rilling, at the Carmel Bach Festival under Bruno Weil, and in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, Brazil in concerts of Bach and Handel. With the Philadelphia Orchestra she appeared as Mrs. Nordstrom in Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music. December 2003 marked her Carnegie Hall debut in Handel's Messiah with the Masterwork Chorus and December 2012 marked her debut with the Pittsburgh Symphony in an innovative staged version of Handel's Messiah. A recording of the Biblical Cantatas of Elizabeth Jacquet de la Guerre is currently in progress.
A native of Rochester NY, she holds her Bachelors degree from SUNY Geneseo and Master of Music degrees in Choral Conducting and Voice Performance from Temple University. Ms. Heimes has recorded for Dorian, Pro Gloria Musicae, Plectra Music, Sonabilis, and Albany and Avian records.
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Marcia Kravis plays historical keyboard instruments and has been the harpsichordist for The
American Society of Ancient Instruments.
She has performed solo and ensemble recitals in Philadelphia,
Annapolis, and Washington, D.C.,
and has accompanied voice master classes by Julianne Baird and recorder master
classes by Marion Verbruggen, Han Tol, and Saskia Coolen. She is a graduate of New England Conservatory
of Music where she studied with John Gibbons. In recent years, she has taken several master
classes and studied privately with Arthur Haas.
Marcia was a music and drama specialist at The Philadelphia School
from 1983-2006. She is currently working
as a Certified Music Practitioner, playing the hammered dulcimer bedside to
patients in hospice and hospital settings.
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“Supple and stylish” (Gramophone Magazine) soprano, Clara Rottsolk has been lauded by The New York Times for her “clear, appealing voice and expressive conviction” and by The Philadelphia Inquirer for the “opulent tone [with which] every phrase has such a communicative emotional presence.” In a repertoire extending from the Renaissance to the contemporary, she has appeared as soloist with ensembles such as Tempesta di Mare, St Thomas Church Fifth Avenue, Philadelphia Bach Collegium, Trinity Wall Street Choir, Baltimore Chamber Orchestra, Bach Sinfonia, Piffaro—The Renaissance Wind Band, Les Délices, Handel Choir of Baltimore, and Ensemble Florilège under conductors including Joshua Rifkin, Bruno Weil, Paul Goodwin, John Scott, David Effron, and Andrew Megill. She also has been heard at the Carmel Bach Festival, Whidbey Island Music Festival, Boston Early Music Festival, Indianapolis Early Music Festival, and the Festival de Música Barroca de Barichara (Colombia). As a recitalist, she has performed throughout the US, in venues including the Goethe-Institut Boston, St. Mark’s Church Philadelphia and Swarthmore College. Among her stage roles are Micaëla (Carmen), Dido (Dido and Aeneas), Arminda (La finta giardiniera) and Laetitia (The Old Maid and the Thief).
Clara Rottsolk earned her music degrees at Rice University and Westminster Choir College, and was awarded for musical excellence by the Metropolitan Opera National Council (Northwest Region). Currently based in Philadelphia, she teaches voice to students at Haverford and Swarthmore Colleges. She can be heard on a recording with the Tempesta di Mare Chamber Players on the Chandos label.
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Steven Zohn is active as a musicologist and performer on historical flutes. Educated at Vassar College and Cornell University, where he received a Ph.D. in Musicology, his research on eighteenth-century music has been published in journals, essay collections, and reference works such as The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the Journal of the American Musicological Society, the Journal of Musicology, Eighteenth-Century Music, Bach Perspectives, the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Early Music, and The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Music. His book, Music for a Mixed Taste: Style, Genre, and Meaning in Telemann’s Instrumental Works (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), is the first book-length study of the composer in English since the 1970s, and received the 2010 William H. Scheide Prize of the American Bach Society. Zohn is also the editor of volumes for the critical editions of C.P.E. Bach and Telemann, and of a volume for the series Recent Researches in the Music of the Baroque Era. A frequent lecturer at scholarly conferences and universities, he is past president of the Society for Eighteenth-Century Music and serves on the editorial boards of the journal Eighteenth-Century Music and the critical edition Georg Philipp Telemann: Musikalische Werke. From 1995 to 2004 he was founding Artistic Director of the period-instrument orchestra Publick Musick, and continues to perform on historical flutes with many ensembles along the east coast. His recordings of music by Bach, Boismortier, Handel, Telemann, and Vivaldi may be heard on the Centaur and Newport Classic labels. Two new CDs of music by Telemann will be released by Centaur in 2011: a world-premiere recording of recently discovered flute duets with flutist Colin St. Martin, and the first complete recording of a set of secular cantatas with soprano Julianne Baird. Zohn’s contribution to the study and performance of early music has been recognized by the American Musicological Society with its Noah Greenberg Award, and his research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, and the German Academic Exchange Service. He is currently Associate Professor of Music History at Temple University’s Boyer College of Music and Dance.
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La Bernardinia Baroque Ensemble,
2133 Mount Vernon Street,
Philadelphia, PA 19130,
267-968-0645, bernardinia@comcast.net |
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