Baroque Music and Dance Workshop
June 20 – 26, 2010

Soprano Christine Brandes has been blessed with a diverse and fascinating career. After graduating from Case Western reserve with a degree in Performance Practice, she went on to work with Nicholas McGegan, William Christie, Phillipe Herreweghe, Freider Bernius, Jane Glover, and Christopher Hogwood – to name a few. She has also had the pleasure of working with the Newberry Consort, Philharmonia Baroque, Tafelmusik, and the American Bach Soloists.

Among the many exciting projects in the 2008-2009 season, Ms. Brandes will be returning to the Lyric Opera of Kansas City as Cleopatra in Handel's Giulio Cesare and to Seattle as Susanna in Le Nozze di Figaro, premiering a new opera by Alan Shearer The Dawn Makers and appearing with Philharmonia Baroque and the Mark Morris Dance Group for the Cal Performances presentation of Handel's L'Allegro.

In the last season Ms. Brandes’s operatic appearances included her Washington National Opera debut as Catherine in William Bolcom's A View from the Bridge and  as Maria Corona in  Menotti's The Saint of Bleecker Street for Central City Opera. Concerts included performances of Das Paradies und die Peri with Sir Simon Rattle and the Philadelphia Orchestra (at the Kimmel Center and at Carnegie Hall), the Mozart Requiem with  the Handel & Haydn Society,  Handel's L'Allegro with the Mark Morris Dance Group and the Seattle Symphony, and Haydn's Mass in the Time of War with Bernard Labadie and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra.

She has sung for the following opera houses: San Francisco, Seattle, Washington National, LA Opera, Houston Grand, Opera Pacific, Minnesota, San Diego, New York City Opera, Philadelphia, Lyric Opera of Kansas City, Glimmerglass, Opera Theatre of St. Louis, Opera de Nancy, and Central City in principal roles ranging from Handel and Mozart, through Verdi to Bolcom and Britten.

She has sung with the following orchestras:  Cleveland, Chicago, New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Houston, Atlanta, Detroit, Seattle, Minnesota, National Symphony, with such distinguished conductors as Simon Rattle, Pierre Boulez, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Frühbeck de Burgos, Robert Spano, Wolfgang Sawallisch, and Alan Gilbert.

Frances Blaker, Recorders, received her Music Pedagogical and Performance degrees in recorder from the Royal Danish Conservatory of Music in Copenhagen where she studied with Eva Legêne.  She also studied with Marion Verbruggen in the Netherlands.  Ms. Blaker has performed as a soloist and with various ensembles in the United States, Denmark, England, and the Netherlands. She is a member of Farallon Recorder Quartet and the Tibia Recorder Duo and of Ensemble Vermillian.  She teaches privately and at workshops throughout the United States. She is an assistant director of the Amherst Early Music Festival, Inc.  Ms. Blaker is the author of The Recorder Player's Companion and the "Opening Measures" column in the American Recorder, and a collaborator and performer on the Disc Continuo series of play-along recordings. She was awarded month-long residencies focusing on music composition at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology in Otis, Oregon in April 2003 and 2006. Her compositions have been published by PRB Productions and Lost in Time Press. Her new work, Five Poems, based on poems by Chinese Buddhist nuns, was premiered in Carmel Valley, CA, November, 2007. Ms. Blaker has recorded works by Ludwig Senfl with the Farallon Recorder Quartet, and two CDs of 17th century German chamber music centering around Buxtehude with Ensemble Vermillian – volume I: Stolen Jewels, and volume 2, released December 1st: Topaz & Sapphire.

Harpsichordist Phebe Craig spent her student years in Berlin, Brussels and San Francisco. Phebe has earned a reputation as a versatile chamber musician and recitalist and has performed and recorded with many early music ensembles and soloists. She has appeared at the Carmel Bach Festival, the Regensburg Tage Alter Musik, and early music festivals and events throughout the United States. She has performed with the New York State Baroque, American Bach Soloists, Arcangeli Baroque Strings, and Concerto Amabile. Phebe is a co-producer of the popular DiscContinuo series of early music play-along CDs and co-author of a recently-published guide to Baroque dance for musicians (Dance at a Glance). She is on the faculty at the University of California at Davis where she teaches harpsichord and co-directs the UCD Baroque Ensemble, in addition to teaching keyboard proficiency, theory and ear-training. She is also co-director of the Baroque Music and Dance Workshop that is sponsored by the San Francisco Early Music Society and takes place at Sonoma State University.

Sand Dalton has been playing and making baroque oboes for over thirty years. He maintains a busy workshop on Lopez Island, Washington, which produces about forty instruments annually.  He recently spent a year of living in Florence, Italy where he immersed himself in Italian culture, history and music and enjoyed the food and wine. Concurrently, he has pursued an active career as a performer and teacher. Over the years he has performed and recorded with many ensembles, including the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, Boston Baroque, the Handel and Hayden Society, Magnificat, Portland Baroque Orchestra, Seattle Baroque, and the Pacific Baroque Orchestra of Vancouver, B.C.

Sand has been on the faculties of the New England Conservatory, the University of British Columbia and Longy School of Music, as well as taught at the summer workshops for the San Francisco Early Music Society, Vancouver Early Music Program, Amherst Early Music Workshop, and the International Baroque Institute at Longy. In 2000 he began directing his own summer workshop for baroque oboes and bassoons on Lopez Island in Washington State.

Dennis Godburn, Bassoon
Widely regarded as one of today’s premier bassoon soloists, Dennis Godburn pursues a distinguished career as a performer of Baroque, Classical, and modern bassoons, concertizing throughout the United States, Europe, Japan, and South America. He has served as Principal Bassoonist for the Orchestra of St. Luke’s since 1976 and is also a member of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. He has performed with the Metropolitan Opera, New England Bach Festival, Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra, Handel and Haydn Society, Waverly Consort, Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, and the Classical Band, among many others. Godburn has also appeared as soloist in the Great Performers series at Lincoln Center and at the Mostly Mozart Festival, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the Ravinia Festival, and the Kennedy Center.

Kathleen Kraft, Flute
Kathleen Kraft began specializing in Baroque flute after completing her studies at the Royal Conservatory in Holland with Frans Vester and Frans Bruggen. Her extensive chamber music and solo performances include concerts for the San Francisco Early Music Society, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the National Flute Convention, the Locronan Festival de Musique in France, and Tage Alte Musik in Regensburg. She has performed with Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, the CBC Vancouver Orchestra, American Bach Soloists, Concerto Amabile, and Pacific Baroque Orchestra in Vancouver.

She lives outside of Occidental CA, and is active in watershed restoration and native coastal prairie conservation projects.

Jonathan Rhodes Lee has performed as soloist, chamber musician, and in orchestras in the United States and abroad. He holds degrees from Colgate University, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and UC Berkeley, and received a 2002 Fulbright Scholarship to study at the Royal Conservatory of Music in The Hague, Netherlands. Jonathan is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Historical Musicology at UC Berkeley. His dissertation is on Handel and the eighteenth-century concept of sensibility.

Jonathan is a founding member and co-director of the baroque ensemble Les grâces (www.lesgraces.com). This group was selected as a semifinalist in this year's Van Wassenaer International Early Music Competition in Amsterdam. Les grâces has also recently been awarded a grant from the San Francisco Friends of Chamber Music for a recording project, slated to begin in June, 2009. In addition to this group recording project, Jonathan is currently editing a solo harpsichord album of eighteenth-century French music. Jonathan has also appeared with groups such as the New Century Chamber Orchestra, Ensemble Vermillion, and the Sarabande Baroque Ensemble, which he co-directed from 2001-2004.

In addition to his performing activities, Jonathan offers services as an instrument technician. He is also the co-author of The Goldberg Variations Reader: A Performer's Guide for Teachers and Students, which appeared in print in September, 2002. His harpsichord instructors have included Jacques Ogg, Davitt Moroney, Laurette Goldberg, and Joscelyn Godwin.

David Morris is a member of Musica Pacifica, The King’s Noyse, the Sex Chordae Consort of Viols, the Galax Quartet, Quicksilver and the New York State Baroque Ensemble. He has performed with Tafelmusik, Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, American Bach Soloists, Musica Angelica, Seattle Baroque Orchestra, the Mark Morris Dance Company, the Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra and Pacific Opera Works (Seattle, WA). He was the founder and musical director of the Bay Area baroque opera ensemble Teatro Bacchino, and has produced operas for the Berkeley Early Music Festival and the San Francisco Early Music Society series. Mr. Morris received his B.A. and M.A. in Music from U.C. Berkeley, and has been a guest instructor in early music performance-practice at UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Mills College, Oberlin College, the Madison Early Music Festival and Cornell University. He has recorded for Harmonia Mundi, New Albion, Dorian, New World Records, Drag City Records and New Line Cinema.

Michael Sand, Violin
Michael Sand received his B.A. from Swarthmore College and a M.M. from the Yale University School of Music, studying with Broadus Erle of the Yale Quartet. After graduation, he began his professional life in San Francisco, where he joined the San Francisco Opera Orchestra, and played principal second violin of the Oakland Symphony. Becoming interested in original instrument movement, he went to Holland to study Baroque violin with Sigiswald Kuijken at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague. For a long time, his career centered around Baroque music. He was one of the founders of Philharmonia, the first period instrument orchestra on the West Coast, while commuting to Europe to work with some of the leading Baroque groups such as Les Arts Florissants and La Chapelle Royale. Back home, he was also involved in the founding of Arcangeli Baroque Strings, a concerto grosso group whose recordings of Bach and Vivaldi have won high notices. His work outside the Bay Area has included appearances as guest director with numerous chamber orchestras in this country and abroad, and he taught for many years as the Jerusalem Music Center in Israel. He is currently the Music Director of NYS Baroque, an original instrument orchestra based in Ithaca, NY, where he has led performances of Bach's B Minor Mass and St John Passion, Handel's Jephtha, and the Monteverdi Vespers. Mr. Sand has recorded for Meridian, Harmonia Mundi (both in France and the United States), Art and Music, KATastroPHE, Wildboar, and Titanic Records. He teaches at the University of California at Davis and at the San Francisco Early Music Society's Baroque Music Workshop.

Mary Springfels, viola da gamba
Mary Springfels remembers hearing New York Pro Musica perform early music for the first time when she was 14 years old. She said she immediately fell in love with it and began learning early music instruments in college. She began playing viola da gamba and related early music instruments professionally in 1968, and is one of the most highly regarded interpreters of pre-1800 music. She was Musician-in-Residence at the Newberry Library from 1982 until her retirement from that post in 2007. Besides founding and directing the Newberry Consort, Springfels has performed and recorded extensively with such ensembles as the New York Pro Musica, the Waverly Consort, Concert Royal, Sequentia, Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, the Seattle Baroque Orchestra, Music of the Baroque, Musica Sacra, the Marlborough Festival, the New York City Opera, and Chicago Opera Theater, where she has served as an artistic advisor.

In Chicago Springfels has also served as a Senior Lecturer at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University. She has taught and performed in summer festivals throughout the US, among them the San Francisco, Madison, and Amherst Early Music Festivals, and the Conclave of the Viola da Gamba Society of America. In 2004 she delivered the keynote address to the Berkeley Festival and Exhibition for Early Music America. Over the past few years, Springfels has become very active in baroque opera, and she has performed with organizations such as the New York City Opera and Central City Opera. She will continue this involvement as well as providing lectures. She can be heard on over two dozen recordings, ten of which are critically acclaimed Newberry Consort projects, including Puzzles and Perfect Beauty: Italian Music at the End of the Middle Ages, released in 2007 by Noyse Productions.

Peter Sykes, Harpsichord
Peter Sykes performs widely on the organ, harpsichord, clavichord, and fortepiano as a soloist and as an ensemble musician. With Christa Rakich he created "Tuesdays With Sebastian," an independent two-year benefit concert series in which he and Ms. Rakich performed the entire keyboard works of Johann Sebastian Bach for the organ, harpsichord and clavichord in thirty-four recitals in five Boston-area locations in the 2003-04 and 2004-05 concert seasons. He appears regularly in concert and on recordings with Boston Baroque. In March 2004 he was given the honor of performing the dedication recital on the newly restored 1800 Tannenberg organ in Old Salem, North Carolina, a performance featured on the nationally broadcast television show "CBS Sunday Morning." In November 2005 he performed the inaugural recital on the newly restored 1866 Koehnken organ in the Isaac Wise Temple in Cincinnati.

His solo recordings include J.S. Bach's complete Leipzig Chorales recorded on the Noack organ of the Langholtskirkja in Reykjavik, Iceland, and music of Reger recorded on a Steinmeyer organ in Altoona, Pennsylvania. His recording of his organ transcription of Holst's orchestral suite "The Planets" was named Best of 1996 by Audio Review, a "Super CD" by Absolute Sound in 1999, and garnered accolades in every review. He appears on the Cambridge Bach Ensemble recording "The Muses of Zion," performing organ works of Tunder and Buxtehude on the Fisk meantone organ of Wellesley College, the Music from Aston Magna recording of Handel's oratorio "The Triumph of Time and Truth" containing Handel's first known organ concerto, a recording of the organ concerto "Cymbale" of Julian Wachner, and the Grammy-nominated Boston Baroque recordings of Handel's Messiah, Bach's B-Minor Mass, and Monteverdi's Vespers. Soon to appear will be a recording of Bach's harpsichord Partitas on the Centaur label.

As an ensemble musician he has performed with Musica Antiqua Köln, Ensemble Project Ars Nova, the King's Noyse, the New England Bach Festival, Winsor Chamber Music, Mistral, Aston Magna Festival, Chameleon Ensemble, the Van Swieten and Borromeo Quartets, Cantata Singers, New England String Ensemble, and the Portland Chamber Music Festival. He was a member of the continuo team for the Boston Early Music Festival opera productions of Cavalli's Ercole Amante, Conradi's Ariadne, and Lully's Thesée and Psyché.

He holds degrees from the New England Conservatory, where he studied with Gabriel Chodos, Blanche Winogron, Mireille Lagacé, Robert Schuneman, and Yuko Hayashi, and Concordia University in Montreal, where he studied with Bernard Lagacé. In 1978 he was winner of the Chadwick Medal from the New England Conservatory for outstanding undergraduate achievement. He was the 1993 laureate of the Erwin Bodky Award for excellence in early music performance. In May 2005 he received the Outstanding Alumni award from the New England Conservatory for career achievement since graduation.

He is Associate Professor of Music and Chair of the Historical Performance Department at Boston University, Director of Music at First Church in Cambridge, Congregational, a member of the faculties of the Longy School of Music and the New England Conservatory, and is a founding board member and current president of the Boston Clavichord Society.

www.petersykes.com

Tangkao Tan, Baroque dance
Mr. Tan has studied Baroque dance with Helena Kazarova, Dorothee Wortelboer and Marc Leclerq in Europe, Angene Feves and Ken Pierce in America. For two years he appeared in monthly performances with Collegium Marianum, a Prague based Baroque ensemble, consisting of musicians and dancers. From 1998 to 2002, he appeared with Czech National Theater in Prague as a soloist in Jean Philipp Rameau's 'Castor et Pollux'.

Mr. Tan founded his own company "Delices de la Muse" in 2001 and since then has been active as a teacher and performer in northern California.

Mr. Tan holds a BA degree in Dance Pedagogy and has been teaching Baroque dance at SFEMS annual Summer Workshop since 2003.

Marion Verbruggen, Recorders
Amsterdam-born recorder player Marion Verbruggen is one of the most extraordinary virtuosos of her generation. Famed for her high-spirited, technically dazzling performances, she has earned an international reputation as a master of style on her instrument throughout North America, Europe, Africa, Japan and Australia. Enamored of the recorder at an early age, she studied at the Amsterdam Conservatory in The Hague with Frans Bruggen. Upon completing her diplomas cum laude, she was invited to join the faculty at the Royal Conservatory. Her prizes include the first International Recorder Competition in Bruges, the Nicolai Prize for the Performances of Contemporary Dutch Music, and the Erwin Bodky Award for Early Music. As a soloist Marion Verbruggen plays with prestigious ensembles including Musica Antiqua Koln, Akademie fur Ancient Musick Berlin, The Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra, Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and Tafelmusick Orchestra. She performs in chamber music ensembles with other renowned early music artists including harpsichordists Gustav Leonhardt, Bob Van Asperen and Ton Koopman, gambist Wieland Kuijken, baroque cellist Jaap ter Linden, and violinist Lucy van Dael. Her early music festival appearances include Utrecht, Berkeley, Berlin, Boston, and Tel Aviv. Marion Verbruggen also plays solo recitals throughout the world. Marion Verbruggen guest teaches at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague and gives master classes and workshops throughout the world. Her diverse discography includes music ranging from 17th century Spanish songs and theatre music to her own transcriptions of the JS Bach Cello Suites. She has recorded for BMG, EMI Erato, harmonia mundi usa, Ricercar, Sony, Titanic, and Accent.