A native of San Jose, California, Rebekah Ahrendt performs frequently in the United States and Europe with ensembles including Disperata, Kharabaja, Les Violettes, and Het Internationaal Collectief Oude Muziek (ICOM). After beginning her viola da gamba studies with John Dornenburg, Rebekah earned a Certificate in Baroque Performance Practice and an Artist’s Diploma from the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, where she was a student of Anneke Pols from 1998 to 2002. She has participated in masterclasses and workshops with Wieland Kuijken, Jordi Savall, and Sarah Cunningham, among others. Rebekah is currently completing a doctoral dissertation in musicology at UC Berkeley.
Louise Carslake has performed throughout her native country of Great Britain, as well as in China, Holland, Ireland, Poland, New Zealand and the USA. She has recorded for the Centaur, Meridian, and Intrada labels and for Magnatune. She is a founding member of the baroque ensemble Music's Re-creation and the Farallon Recorder Quartet. She also performs on flute and recorder with Magnificat and the Jubilate Baroque Orchestra, and has appeared with the San Francisco Opera and Carmel Bach Festival. Louise teaches on the faculty at Mills College. She is a graduate of Trinity College of Music, London, and she also studied baroque flute with Wilbert Hazelzet in the Netherlands, and performance practice with Nikolaus Harnoncourt at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria.
Bruce Dickey was a trumpeter by training, but a contact with the recorder while still a student sparked an interest in early music which he pursued while earning a degree in musicology at the Indiana University School of Music. A year of recorder studies at the renowned Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in Basel (Switzerland) turned into a permanent job as teacher of cornetto at the same institution. Many years of performing and recording with the leading figures in the field of early music (Jordi Savall, Andrew Parrott, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Gustav Leonhardt, Ton Koopman, Monica Huggett, Philippe Herreweghe, and others) provided the background for what has become his principal activity, the ensemble Concerto Palatino. Bruce Dickey can be heard on more than five dozen recordings. His solo recording ("Quel lascivissimo cornetto...") with the ensemble Tragicomedia was awarded the prestigious Diapason d'or. In 2000 the Historic Brass Society bestowed on him the prestigious Christopher Monk Award for "his monumental work in cornetto performance, historical performance practice and musicological scholarship".
John Dornenburg has performed in Europe, Turkey, Australia, New Zealand, and across the U.S.A. as viola da gamba soloist. He appears on over 25 CD recordings which include solo works for viol by J. S. Bach, St. Colombe, Hume, Marais, C. P. E. Bach, Telemann, and Handel. John teaches the viola da gamba on the faculty at Stanford University and lectures in music history at California State University, Sacramento. In the San Francisco Bay Area he has performed with the San Francisco Symphony, Magnificat, Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, American Bach Soloists, Carmel Bach Festival, and many other groups, and has been a guest soloist with various ensembles across the country including Chatham Baroque, Ensemble Rebel, Aston Magna, Oregon Bach Festival, and Monadnock Festival. He is founder of the baroque ensemble Music's Re-creation, and director of the Sex Chordæ Consort of Viols.
Rotem Gilbert, recorder and double reeds is a native of Israel. She is a founding member of Ciaramella, a Renaissance ensemble that has performed in early music series in the United States and Europe. She currently teaches Baroque and Renaissance performance practice courses at USC Thornton School of Music and is an instructor of early winds. As a member of Piffaro, she has toured the United States, Europe and South America. After studies on recorder at Mannes College of Music, she earned her solo diploma from the Scuola Civica di Musica of Milan where she studied with Pedro Memelsdorff. She earned her doctorate in Early Music performance practice at Case Western Reserve University.
Jennifer Lane currently teaches at the University of North Texas, having held positions at Stanford University and at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. She has some fifty CD recordings to her credit and her films include Dido & Aeneas, with the Mark Morris Dance Group, and The Opera Lover, a romantic comedy. She has been featured in prestigious festivals and productions worldwide, singing principal roles with SFO, NYCO, the Metropolitan Opera, Aix-en-Provence, Gottingen, Chatelet, Caen, Monte Carlo, and many others. She has directed productions at Stanford, the Lake Placid Institute and the Staunton VA Blackfriars Theatre, and has given master classes at the Royal Academy, San Francisco Conservatory, Mannes, and the Peabody Institute, among others. She is currently involved in an ongoing celebration of the 400th anniversary of Monteverdi's Orfeo, with the Spanish group Capella de Ministrers, singing the dual roles of Messaggiera/Speranza, and she recently sang the role of Carmen in the theatrical Peter Brook adaptation of the opera.
Christopher LeCluyse specializes in early music and choral repertoire. He most recently joined Conspirare for a recording of choral works by Tarik O'Regan, to be released by Harmonia Mundi in 2009. His performances in the Bay Area include appearances with Conspirare, Magnificat, and Voices of Music as well as the title role in the 2003 SFEMS Medieval Renaissance production of the Play of Daniel. He has also performed with the Texas Early Music Project, La Follia Austin Baroque, and the Houston-based groups Ars Lyrica and Canzonetta. After studying voice and English at Oberlin, Dr. LeCluyse received a PhD in English from the University of Texas at Austin, studying bilingual poems and songs from medieval England. He now teaches at Westminster College in Salt Lake City.
A native of San Francisco, Peter Maund studied percussion at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and music, folklore, and ethnomusicology at the University of California, Berkeley. He has performed and recorded with numerous ensembles, including Ensemble Alcatraz, Ensemble Project Ars Nova, Chanticleer, Davka, El Mundo, Hesperion XX, Kitka, Alasdair Fraser Skyedance and Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra. He has presented lectures, workshops, and classes in the United States, Canada and Scotland and has served on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, the Amherst Early Music Institute, and the San Francisco Early Music Society.
Patricia Petersen holds an MFA in Early Music Performance from Sarah Lawrence College. A founding member of Cappella Nova, recorded by Musical Heritage Society, she went on to found the award-winning a capella Renaissance choir Fortuna in 1984. She directs the Amherst Festival Choir on a CD of music of Heinrich Isaac, and is a regular faculty member at Amherst's and other workshops around the country. A performer on recorder and other early winds, she has appeared with the Charleston Symphony Orchestra. She has been Musician-in-Residence at North Carolina State University and has coached early music ensembles at Wake Forest University and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She teaches recorder, early music, and English country dance in North Carolina and at workshops around the country, and has a passion for playing from facsimiles of early 15th-century music.
David Tayler received his B.A. in music and interdisciplinary studies from Hunter College and his M.A. and Ph.D. in musicology from the University of California at Berkeley, where he studied performance practice with Philip Brett and Alan Curtis and musicology with Joseph Kerman, Richard Crocker and Daniel Heartz. He is a member of Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra and Director of the Bay Area Collegium Musicum and Ensemble Pandore. David has appeared with American Bach Soloists, Tafelmusik, the San Francisco Opera & Symphony, the Dallas Bach Society, the Oregon Bach Festival and the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, among others, and has recorded over fifty discs for BIS, harmonia mundi USA, Koch International, ORF, Sony, Reference, Arabesque, BMG, RCA, Musica Omnia and Teldec. As a specialist in the art song of the early seventeenth century he has performed in lute song recitals throughout Europe and the United States.
Margriet Tindemans has delighted audiences all over the world with her performances on early stringed instruments: viola da gamba, medieval fiddle and rebec, renaissance and baroque viola. She performs and records as a soloist and with Medieval Strings, which she directs, and the King's Noyse. She is a frequent guest with North America's and Europe's leading early music ensembles. She was a founding member of the German ensemble Sequentia and of the Belgian Huelgas Ensemble. She directs the Medieval Women's Choir, a Seattle-based group that studies and performs the medieval vocal repertoire composed by and for women. Margriet Tindemans records for Musica Omnia, harmonia mundi, Erato, Wildboar, BMG, Classical Masters, Accent, EMI, Smithsonian Collection and Koch International Classics.
Charles Toet received his musical training at the Royal Conservatory of the Hague, where he studied modern trombone with Anne Bijlsma (senior) and where he began to specialize in early music and baroque trombone, which he now teaches at the same institution as well as at the Schola Cantorum Basliensis (Basel) and the Musikhochschule in Trossingen (Germany). He currently divides his energies between the seventeenth century (mostly with Concerto Palatino of which he is the co-founder) and the Classical and early Romantic repertoires, played on original instruments with such period orchestras as La Petite Bande, The Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra, and the Orchestra des Champs-Elysées. He has performed and recorded extensively with Bruce Dickey and Concerto Palatino and with numerous other ensembles of particular importance to the history of early music, including, in addition to the ones mentioned above, Syntagma Musicum of Amsterdam, The Taverner Players of London, the Hilliard Ensemble, Hespérion XX, and the vocal ensemble Currende.
Hanneke van Proosdij received her solo and teaching diplomas from the Royal Conservatory in The Hague where she studied recorder, harpsichord and composition. She performs regularly as soloist and continuo specialist with Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, Festspiel Orchester Göttingen, Voices of Music, American Bach Soloists and Magnificat. She has appeared as a guest artist with Concerto Palatino, Hespérion XX, Arcadian Academy, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchester and Concerto Köln. She has recorded over thirty discs for Magnatune, BIS, Koch International, Musica Omnia, Carus, AVIE and Delos. Her solo recording is available online at www.magnatune.com/artists/proosdij. Hanneke enjoys reading books and downhill skiing.