Under the Arches: Chamber Music Series

This summer’s free, outdoor chamber music series will focus on Early Music, a term encompassing all choral and instrumental music stretching from the early Middle Ages through the Renaissance to the middle of the 17th century. This music is marked by beautiful, textured vocals and melodic harpsichords and lutes, and there is no better place to enjoy this beauty of sound than Pequot Library’s Great Lawn. In the case of inclement weather, concerts will take place in Pequot Library’s auditorium.

Schedule:

Friday, June 21 at 6:00pm | Elm City Consort

This group of musicians in the New Haven area is dedicated to presenting imaginative and entertaining programs of Early Music. With more than 10 years of public performances, the Elm City Consort has developed a loyal and enthusiastic following among  music lovers in New Haven and beyond.

Mandy Wolman attended Oberlin Conservatory and performs with many of the best-known early music ensembles in the country. Mandy recently won a Grammy award with The Crossing choir for their recording of Zealot Canticles. She has been a guest faculty member at the Curtis Institute of Music and Apple Hill Chamber Music Festival. Mandy also studies and performs Flamenco dance and is an accomplished visual artist working in ink, charcoal and watercolor.

New Haven resident Daniel Lee also performs with and directs many ensembles including his own, the Sebastians, based in New York City. He is concertmaster for the Providence (RI) Baroque Orchestra and the baroque orchestra in residence at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC. Daniel has degrees from Juilliard and Yale. Currently, he teaches baroque performance practice at the Yale School of Music. In addition to his busy life as a musician, Daniel is also a pastor in the Presbyterian Church.

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Friday, June 28 at 6:00pm | New York Waytes 

Experience an Italian 17th-century sonata, l’Arte di Suonare, emblematic of the early baroque aesthetic. The first instrumental style to emerge in this new ground was the Stylus Fantasticus. It features spirited rhetorical dialogues of tempos, affects, timbres, and textures– stark contracts of audio juxtaposed. This program invites you into a verdant, dreamlike garden of sounds.

Featuring music by: Fontana, Castello, Bertoli, and other sculptors of sound

DIRK WELS | recorder

JOSEPH JONES | dulcian

BODIE PFOST| sackbut

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Friday, July 12 at 6:00pm | Piffaro, with Grant Herreid, Yale University Professor of Music and Priscilla Herrerid, Director of Piffaro

Piffaro, The Renaissance Band’s mission is to delight audiences with historically informed performances of music from the late Medieval, Renaissance and early Baroque periods, in the manner of the civic, court and chapel wind bands, which existed roughly from 1450-1650. They aim to entertai and educate others in the music itself, its role in the culture of those periods, and its link to music of our day.

Priscilla Herreid is a musician in the ancient and living tradition of woodwind doubling. Her formative years studying recorder at Philadelphia’s Settlement Music School led her to the High School for Creative and Performing Arts, where she began playing the oboe. The daughter of musicians, Priscilla was immersed in the sounds of Oswald von Wolkenstein, J.S. Bach, Paul Hindemith, Chick Corea – a childhood soundtrack that led organically to a love of and fascination with early music, and the desire to make that into her living.

Grant Herreid performs frequently on early reeds, brass, strings and voice with many US early music ensembles. A specialist in early opera, he has played theorbo, lute and baroque guitar with the Chicago Opera Theater, Aspen Music Festival, Portland Opera, and New York City Opera. A noted teacher and educator, he is the recipient of Early Music America’s Laurette Goldberg award for excellence in early music outreach and education. He directs the Yale Collegium Musicum, and the Yale Baroque Opera Project (YBOP). Grant also directs the New York Continuo Collective, and recently played hurdy gurdy, lute, theorbo, cittern, and percussion in the Broadway productions of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and Richard III, starring Mark Rylance and Stephen Fry. He has created and directed several theatrical early music shows, and he devotes much of his time to exploring the esoteric unwritten traditions of early music with the ensemble Ex Umbris.

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Please bring your own food and chairs. Drinks will be available for purchase from the Rocks and Roll bartender truck

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