Bios-2019-20

La Bernardinia Baroque Ensemble

Rainer Beckmann plays recorder with a large variety of early music ensembles in the Philadelphia tri-state area. He is a member of New World Recorders and Vox Renaissance Consort. As featured soloist and guest musician, he has appeared with Camerata Ama Deus, Gamut Bach Ensemble, Pennsylvania Sinfonia Orchestra, Brandywine Baroque, Melomanie, Gabriel Chamber Ensemble, and West Jersey Chamber Music Society. He has also concertized with Philadelphia Bach Collegium, Opera at Rutgers, The Bach Choir of Bethlehem, Curtis Opera, Tempesta di Mare Baroque Orchestra, and Piffaro: The Renaissance Band. Before moving to the United States, he performed in Germany, the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Italy, Israel, and Brazil. Rainer is the music director of the Philadelphia Recorder Society. He is a graduate of the Utrecht Conservatory of Music (Netherlands), where he studied recorder with Heiko ter Schegget, Baldrick Deerenberg, and Marion Verbruggen.

Marcia Kravis holds a Master of Music degree from New England Conservatory of Music where she studied with John Gibbons. She is a founding member of La Bernardinia Baroque Ensemble and Ensemble Sebastian. Marcia was the harpsichordist for the American Society of Ancient Instruments for over a decade and has accompanied master classes by Julianne Baird, Marion Verbruggen, Han Tol, Sandra Miller and Saskia Coolen. She teaches harpsichord and piano privately in the Fairmont neighborhood of Philadelphia. As a harpsichordist Marcia performs solo recitals, plays with La Bernardinia Baroque Ensemble, Ensemble Sebastian and other baroque groups in the Philadelphia and South Jersey areas. She is an occasional guest harpsichordist and coach with the Temple Preparatory Orchestra.

and guests

Praised for her “sparkle and humor, radiance and magnetism”, hailed for "a voice equally velvety up and down the registers" and singled out for her “imaginative ornamentation”, 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, TENET, Voices of Music, Tempesta di Mare, The King’s Noyse, Paul O’Dette, Chatham Baroque, Apollo’s Fire, Brandywine Baroque, ARTEK, and Piffaro – The Renaissance Band, a group with whom she has toured the United States. She has been heard at the Boston, Berkeley, Connecticut, Miami 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, Andrew Megill and Paul Goodwin, 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 in 2011 appeared in an acclaimed staged production of the same work with the Pittsburgh Symphony under Maestro Honeck. Her most recent recordings include Judith and other Sacred Canatas by René Drouard de Bousset, On The Just Treatment of Licentious Men (modern art songs by Peter Flint), Cantatas Françoises (music of Jacquet de la Guerre and Clérambault), Handel Duets and Trios; Oh! the Sweet Delights of Love: the songs of Purcell with Brandywine Baroque; The Lass with the Delicate Air: English Songs from the London Pleasure Gardens; The Jane Austen Songbook with Julianne Baird; and Caldara's Il Giuoco del Quadriglio with Julianne Baird and the Queen's Chamber Band conducted by Stephen Altop. A CD of the Biblical cantatas of Elizabeth Jacquet de la Guerre with Julianne Baird is in progress. A native of Rochester NY, Ms. Heimes has recorded for Dorian, Pro Gloria Musicae, Plectra Music, Sonabilis, Albany, Avian and Zefiro records.

Paul Miller is a music theorist and a performer specializing in music of the 17th, 18th and 20th centuries. Before joining the musicianship department of the Mary Pappert School of Music at Duquesne University in 2015, he served as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University and on the faculties of the University of Colorado in Boulder and Temple University. Paul has presented research at numerous national and regional conferences, and his work has been published in Perspectives of New Music, the American Music Research Center Journal, Twentieth-Century Music, Music and Letters and Opera Quarterly. Forthcoming research will be published in Early Music and the MLA Association’s Notes. An expert on the remarkable music of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Paul studied with the composer for six summers and premiered his solo viola work "In Freundschaft" in Europe and the United States. Paul's research has centered on the unusual spatial dimension of Stockhausen's music as well as the phenomenon of metric complexity. In addition, he has studied viola d’amore music in Bohemian and Moravian manuscripts. As a performer, Paul has appeared at the Metropolitian Museum of Art in New York City, the Library of Congress, the National Cathedral in Washington D.C., the Darmstadt International Festival for New Music, the Bethlehem Bach Festival, the Hawai`i Performing Arts Festival and with ensembles such as El Mundo and Tempesta di Mare. He has collaborated in chamber music concerts with Richard Savino and Jory Vinikour, both Grammy® award nominees. During his tenure as a fellow at Cornell, Paul led the Baroque Orchestra there and studied with Neal Zaslaw, Christopher Hogwood and Malcolm Bilson. Paul also performs on a five-string electric violin built by the firm Zeta. As a pedagogue with 19 years of classroom experience, Paul enjoys teaching everything from fundamental skills such as solfege, voice-leading, counterpoint and harmony to more advanced topics such as Schenkerian analysis and post-tonal theory. His students hold full-time and tenured positions at James Madison University, the Pittsburgh Symphony, the San Francisco Conservatory and other top-tier institutions throughout the country. He holds a Ph.D. from the Eastman School of Music and a Master's in viola performance (Eastman). Paul's undergraduate studies were at Vassar College, New England Conservatory and Harvard University.