Awards Grants Discoveries Education
Transcription
Awards Grants Discoveries Education
Compiled by Angela Fasick ma, a Kyoto Prize Medal, and a cash gift of 50 million yen (approximately $460,000) in received the 2005 Chorus Kyoto, Japan. America Margaret Hillis Massachusetts Institute of Achievement Award for Technology student Mary Choral Excellence at the organization’s annual confer- Farbood won first prize at this year’s ence, held this year in ChicaPrague go in June. The award is preSpring Fessented once every three years tival Interto an ensemble that demonnational strates artistic excellence, a Harpsistrong organizational strucchord ture, and a commitment to Mary Competioutreach, education, and culFarbood tion. Farturally diverse activities. bood, a student of Mark The Boston-based vocal Kroll, was chosen by an interensemble Tapestry was national panel of judges; her awarded the 2005 ECHO Klassik prize by the Deutsche 36 competitors came from Phono-Akademie, the cultural every country in Europe, plus Korea, Japan, China, and the institute of the German United States. recording business, for its Sir John Eliot Gardiner, recording Sapphire Night on the German MDG label. The founder and conductor of CD features music by Hilde- the Monteverdi Choir, Enggard von Bingen and Patricia lish Baroque Soloists, and L’Orchestre Revolutionnaire van Ness. et Romantique, picked up an The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Founda- honorary doctorate from the tion has awarded a Charlotte New England Conservatory W. Newcombe Doctoral Dis- when he gave the school’s sertation Fellowship to Sarah 2005 commencement address J. Eyerly, a Ph.D. candidate at this spring. Gardiner was also this year’s winner of the Bach the University of California, Davis, for her “Singing from the Medal of the city of Leipzig. Heart”: Memorization and Improvisation in Eighteenth-Cen- Grants The Connecticut Commistury Utopian Communities of the sion on Culture and Tourism Moravian Church. awarded Fanfare Consort a Japan’s Inamori Foundagrant to present concerts of tion has selected Austrian early music pioneer Nikolaus Baroque music to school chilHarnoncourt as one of three dren. The concerts will take place in historic Colonial-era laureates for its 21st annual Kyoto Prizes for contributing buildings. The ensemble, led by artistic director Thom significantly to the betterFreas, is also completing a ment of mankind. In November, he will receive a diplo- recording of works by Awards The Rose Ensemble Alessandro Melani for clarino, high voice (male soprano and male alto), Baroque violins, and basso continuo. The McKnight Foundation awarded Lyra Baroque Orchestra (Minneapolis, MN) a $30,000 grant to support its 2005-06 and 2006-07 seasons. Discoveries In June, Michael Maul, a researcher at Leipzig’s Bach Archive, discovered a previously undocumented Bach composition in a shoebox of birthday cards in the Anna Amalia Library in Weimar, Germany. Bach was 28 when he wrote the score in 1713 for the 52nd birthday of Duke Wilhelm Ernst of SaxeWeimar. The piece represents a setting of a strophic aria with ritornello for soprano, strings, and basso continuo. The opening words of the aria “Alles mit Gott und nichts mit ohn’ ihn” mean “Everything with God and nothing without him,” the Duke’s motto, and are from a poem by theologian Johann Anton Mylius. The aria is the first authentic vocal work of Bach’s to be discovered in 70 years. A facsimile and performing edition of the newly discovered piece will be published in the fall of 2005 by Bärenreiter-Verlag of Kassel, Germany. The first recording will be prepared by Sir John Eliot Gardiner. Education This September, Dietrich Buxtehude will be the focus of the American Guild of Organists’ National Conference on Organ Pedagogy at the University of Notre Fanfare Consort Early Music America Fall 2005 3 BOSTON UNIVERSITY School of Music M.M., D.M.A. IN HISTORICAL PERFORMANCE Boston University and Boston Baroque An Exciting New Collaboration in Historical Performance Training Peter Sykes, Department Chairman harpsichord, fortepiano, continuo, performance practice Martin Pearlman, Artist in Residence baroque orchestra, chamber ensembles, performance practice Marilyn McDonald, baroque violin Jane Starkman, baroque violin Christopher Krueger, baroque flute Emlyn Ngai, baroque violin Sarah Freiberg, baroque cello Marc Schachman, baroque oboe Laura Jeppesen, viola da gamba Aldo Abreu, recorder Faculty of the Voice and Opera Departments For more information, contact: Zoë Krohne, Director of Admissions 800-643-4796 • 617-353-3341 cfamusic @bu.edu • www.bu.edu/cfa Resident Professional Ensemble Boston Baroque provides training, educational enrichment, and performance opportunities for current students and graduates of the program. Students play and learn side-by-side with distinguished professionals. 4 Fall 2005 Early Music America An equal opportunity, affirmative action institution. Dame. Kerala Snyder, the author of Dieterich Buxtehude: Organist in Lübeck (Schirmer Books, 1987) will present a keynote lecture each morning of the four-day conference. In April, Steven Plank conducted the Oberlin College Collegium Musicum in music by Josquin, Senfl, and Lassus at the Cathedral Basilica of the Assumption in Covington, KY, and Calvary Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh. Anne and Rob Burns, as A Reasonable Facsimile, presented programs at over 40 Michigan libraries this summer in connection with the national summer reading program themes “Dragons, Dreams and Daring Deeds” for young readers and “Joust Read” for teens. Some of the libraries presenting A Reasonable Facsimile received funding from the Michigan Humanities Council. The Université ParisSorbonne has announced the creation of a master’s degree program in the performance practice of Medieval music, Chanticleer directed by Frédéric Billiet, Katarina Livljanic, and Benjamin Bagby (www.paris4.sorbonne.fr). The Yale Institute of Sacred Music and Yale School of Music appointed lyric tenor James Taylor to the voice faculty in the program in early music, song, and chamber ensemble, as associate professor of voice. Taylor joins Yale from the Musikhochschule in Augsburg, Germany, where he has been a tenured professor of voice since 2001. This fall, Lisa Terry (ARTEK, Parthenia) will join the faculty of the FrenchAmerican Conservatory of Music in Manhattan. Terry will teach viola da gamba, cello, and early music chamber ensembles, including violin band, viol consort, and continuo playing. Premieres In June Chanticleer, the 12-man vocal ensemble based in San Francisco, performed the world premiere of Hildegard: A Measure of Joy, a music theater piece based on the life of 12thcentury abbess, mystic, and composer Hildegard von Bingen. Opera and theater director Francesca Zambello worked with Chanticleer music director Joseph Jennings and the singers to stage the piece. Playwright Donna DiNovelli wrote the book; Broadway veteran Anita Yavich designed the costumes. The music includes selections by Hildegard von Bingen and other composers of her time along with new commissions by contemporary composers Régis Campo and 2005 The unique, ear-opening sounds of Early Music – performed by some of the world’s finest ensembles. Our 19th Season — 2005-2006 at various Milwaukee venues * also in Madison / # also in Evanston Verbruggen & Galhano * Art of the French & German Baroque The Ivory Consort Music in the Land of Three Faiths The Boston Camerata # A Medieval Christmas Hargis & O'Dette *# Amour, Cruel Amour Ex Umbris Melancholy: Downe in the Dumpes The Yukimi Kambe Viol Consort European Roots & International Flowerings For a complete season brochure: EARLY MUSIC NOW 1630 East Royall Place ◆ Milwaukee, WI 53202-1810 414.225.3113 ◆ earlymusicnow@sbcglobal.net 877.54music ◆ earlymusicnow.org Early Music America Fall 2005 5 Berlin’s Sing-Akademie. The Italian Baroque ensemble Modo Antiquo performed the work. “Angels and Archangels,” the 10th-anniversary concert by Musica Spei (Rochester, NY), was devoted to the familiar and the unknown music of Renaissance composer Heinrich Isaac. The concert in June included the world premiere of a rarely performed work by Isaac in a new edition by musicologist and Eastman School of Music professor Patrick Macey. In Memoriam On June 23, 2005, Howard M. Schott died at the age of 82 in Boston, MA. Schott was raised in New York and attended Yale University and Yale Law School. He served in the U.S. Army Military Intelligence Service during WWII. After a 20-year career in international law, he returned to the study of keyboard music and instruments at Oxford in 1968 and received his D.Phil. in Les Voix humaines Susie Napper & Margaret Little :: viols Photo: Johanne Mercier Pulitzer Prize-winner Steven Stucky. In August, Ignoti Dei Opera, a young opera company based in Baltimore, Maryland, presented the New World premiere staging of Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s 1688 masterpiece David et Jonathas. IDO gathered a cast of all male leads from around the world, along with a period orchestra, to perform the work. The Magnolia Baroque Festival in Winston-Salem, NC, featured an aria, once thought to be lost, from Johann Friedrich Agricola’s oratorio Die Hirten bei der Krippe (The Shepherds at the Manger). Glenn Siebert, the festival’s founder and director, found a copy in the archives of the Moravian Music Foundation. The Vivaldi opera Motezuma received its modern-day premiere in Rotterdam this June. The German musicologist Steffen Voss discovered the work, composed in 1733 for the Teatro di Sant’Angelo in Venice, in an archive in Montreal s’ internationally acclaimed viola da gamba duo “wild and exhilarating” :: “fluidity and virtuosity” :: “expressive vitality and sophistication” Early wind players in New York City’s Right Track studio recording the sound track in June for the new Disney film Casanova, a romantic comedy directed by Lasse Hallstrõm, starring Heath Ledger and scheduled for release in late December. “These are passionately committed performances, resonant and full of fresh insights... Napper and Little have momentarily penetrated the mists of time.” – JULIE ANNE SADIE, GRAMOPHONE AWARDS ISSUE, 2003 “Their long experience of playing as a duo means that they think and play as one person, (…) approaching the near-miraculous.” – BRIAN ROBINS, FANFARE, NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2001 BOOKING: Élisabeth Comtois :: Agence Station-Bleue T: 514.273.3093 :: email: elisabe@attglobal.net w w w. l e s v o i x h u m a i n e s . o r g Early Music America Fall 2005 7 make its debut with the New World Symphony under the baton of Robert King. 1978. He published several works on historical keyboards and was an active participant in the early music communities of England, New York, and Boston. A memorial concert will be held in October. Debuts Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, the German Baroque ensemble founded in East Berlin in 1982, made its American debut in May 2005 with a five-city tour that took them to Illinois, Washington, D.C., New York, Massa- chusetts, and California. The international debut of reconstruction came this spring when the Californiabased quartet presented concerts in Mexico at the Teatro Nazas in Torreon and at the Festival de San Luis Potosi. Led by Patrick Dupré Quigley, Seraphic Fire, the chamber choir once affiliated with the Church of the Epiphany in Miami, will go regional this fall, giving performances in Coral Gables, Fort Lauderdale, and Palm Beach. The group will also Good Causes Exsultemus, the Bostonbased choral octet, participated in “Walk for Music,” an event that brought together performers, families, and friends from across New England to support the activities of local music organizations. In June, L’Ensemble Portique ended its third season with a benefit concert where all proceeds from ticket and CD sales went to the Episcopal Relief and Development Not Only a Mozart Anniversary Parthenia’s 2005-06 season will kick off with a celebration of the 400th anniversary of Tobias Hume’s publication of the First Part of Ayres. Baritone Thomas Meglioranza will join the ensemble in a program called “A Soldier’s Resolution: Music from the time of Cpt. Tobias Hume.” In honor of the 200th anniversary of the death of Luigi Boccherini, Lyra Baroque Orchestra will present a November concert with guest artist Raffaella Milanesi (soprano) featuring Parthenia 8 Fall 2005 Early Music America three arias, two symphonies, and a scene by the Italian composer. Les Voix Humaines will celebrate its 20th anniversary season with a Montreal concert series called “Angels and Devils.” Viol virtuoso Wieland Kuijken and soprano Suzie LeBlanc will join the duo, composed of viola da gambists Susie Napper and Margaret Little, for select concerts. What began with Sarah Bernhardt’s performance of Racine’s Phèdre, a benefit for the Emergency Relief Fund after San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake and fire, has become, 100 years later, the acclaimed presenting program Cal Performances. The Bay Area presenter will celebrate its centennial season with a year of special events, including special concerts in its Music Before 1850 series. Scheduled to perform are recorder player Horacio Franco, Sequentia, Yukimi Kambe Viol Consort, the Bach Collegium Japan, and a concert by the Tallis Scholars celebrating the 500th anniversary of the birth of their namesake. Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra will begin its sil- ver anniversary season in September by offering an opera on its subscription series for the first time. Nicholas McGegan, himself celebrating 20 years as music director of the group, will conduct Handel’s 1736 opera Atalanta. This year, Philharmonia Baroque is launching a new partnership with Magnatune to distribute the group’s live concert recordings by means of the Internet. Other presenting groups celebrating anniversaries this year include Kansas City’s Friends of Chamber Music (30th anniversary) and the San Diego Early Music Society (25th anniversary). fund of St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church in Wilmette, IL. Festivals & Workshops The 33rd Aston Magna Festival opened with a Spanish zarzuela by Sebastián Durón. Guest director Richard Savino oversaw the production of Salir el amor del mundo, which featured sopranos Roberta Anderson, Nancy Armstrong, and Jennifer Ellis, mezzo-sopranos Laurie Monahan and Debra Rentz-Moore, and baritone, guitarist, and percussionist Paul Shippers. Aston Magna artistic director Daniel Stepner led the chamber orchestra. Accademia d’Amore Baroque Opera Workshop relocated to Seattle this year from its previous home in Bremen, Germany. Artistic director Stephen Stubbs, a Seattle native, moved the workshop in anticipation of his own permanent move back home next year. With the assistance of the Early Music Guild, Stubbs offered the workshop and its culminating concert at Seattle Pacific University in August. Highlights of the 12th Bloomington Early Music Festival included ARTEK’s lat- est project “I’ll Never See the Send Us Your News! Sound Bytes Winter 2005 Deadline: September 26 Sound Bytes tries to cover early music news and newsmakers as completely as possible, but we cannot publish every news item. All materials must be dated, include a name and contact number, and sent to: Sound Bytes, EMAg, 2366 Eastlake Ave. East, #429, Seattle, WA 98102; e-mail: emag@earlymusic.org (include “Sound Bytes” in subject line). Digital photos may be sent by e-mail as 300 dpi TIFF or JPEG images in color or b&w. Early Music America Fall 2005 9 A NEW VOICE IN EARLY MUSIC RECORDINGS CARL CARL PHILIPP PHILIPP EMANUEL EMANUEL BACH BACH TRIO SONATAS Karen Flint, Director O H ! T HE SWEET D ELIGHTS OF LOVE Henry Purcell, Thomas Chilcot & Johann Christian Bach BRANDYWINE BAROQUE Karen Flint, director Julianne Baird, soprano Laura Heimes, soprano Tony Boutté, tenor WWW.PLECTRA.ORG 10 Fall 2005 Early Music America Stars Again,” the Modus Ensemble for Medieval Music from Oslo, Norway, and an evening with the Dodworth Saxhorn Band. An unpublished flute concerto in D by Johann Joachim Quantz was recently performed at the Capitol Hill Chamber Music Festival with Baroque flutist Jeffrey Cohan as the soloist. The Library of Congress holds manuscripts of four of Quantz’s flute concerti, and last year’s festival included a performance of the E Minor concerto from the same collection. Healing Muses (Eileen Hadidian, recorder and Baroque flute, and Maureen Brennan, Celtic harp), a group that brings soothing music to Bay Area hospitals, clinics, and convalescent homes, presented a spring workshop on “Healing with Music” to a diverse group of 35 participants playing a variety of instruments, including recorder, flute, viol, cello, Celtic harp, and Finnish folk harp. Ron and Ruth Moir, the Moir Fortepiano Duo, presented two workshops in June at the “Art of Teaching” conference held at the Royal Conservatory of Music, Toronto. They addresssed piano teachers from all parts of Canada, introducing them to both harpsichord and fortepiano performance practices. Audiences traveled the world with the SoHIP concert series this summer, hearing music from the Low Countries, the palazzi of Venice, the salons of Paris, and the tumultuous battlefields of the English Civil War. The concert series was presented in Moir Fortepiano Duo Weston, Ipswich, and Boston and featured Cut Circle, Duo DoubleAction, Très, Amphion’s Lyre, La Donna Musicale, and Seven Times Salt. The Tudor Choir performed with members of the Tallis Scholars in the opening concert of the week-long Tallis Scholars Summer School, held for the first time in the U.S. at Seattle University in July. A second concert at the end of the week featured participants in Renaissance motets and chants under the direction of Peter Phillips. Early Opera Bowling Green Opera Theater (Ohio) will present Pietro Francesco Cavalli’s Gli Amore d’Apollo e di Daphne in November. Stage direction will be provided by Ron Shields, musical direction by Emily Freeman Brown, and Paul O’Dette will serve as guest artist and performance practice coach. City Concert Opera Orchestra of San Francisco presented Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Il Parnaso confuso in Italian, accompanied by period instruments, this August. Gluck wrote the serenata teatrale for four of Empress Maria Teresa’s daughters, evidently quite accomplished singers (the fifth was Marie Antoinette). In this produc- tion, Mitzi Weiner (Apollo), Carole Schaffer (Melipomene), Rita Lillay (Euterpe), and Elspeth Franks (Erato) filled the daughters’ roles, while Gilbert Martinez provided continuo and Tom Busse conducted. The Early Music Guild of Seattle produced John Blow’s Venus and Adonis this past February under the supervision of James Middleton, stage director, and Fred Hauptman, music director, with choreography by Anna Mansbridge. The performance drew on the talents of more than 30 Northwest artists, including 11 singers, nine instrumentalists active in various Seattle-based Baroque ensembles, professional dancers from Seattle Early Dance, and student dancers from the Creative Dance Center. The opera was made possible by much local support, including grants from the Nesholm Family Foundation, PONCHO, the Seattle Foundation, and ArtsFund, as well as many generous individuals. Georg Philip Telemann’s comic opera Don Quixote, The Wedding of Comacho closed out Mercury Baroque Orchestra’s 2004-2005 season – just in time for the 400th anniversary of the publication of Cervantes’s novel. Sung in German with English surtitles, the opera featured Paul Busselberg as Don Quixote and bass-baritone Sam Handley as Sancho Panza. Kate Pogue served as stage director and Antoine Plante conducted the orchestra, choir, and cast. Brooklyn was the site of The New York Continuo Collective’s semi-staged work- shop production of Alessandro Leardini’s Psiche (libretto by Diamante Gabrielli). Grant Herreid directed the opera, while coaching was provided by Paul Shipper (gesture) and Pat O’Brien (musical). Over 34 performers lent their talents to the May production. Les Voix Baroque, in collaboration with Early Music Vancouver, I Confidenti Berlin, SRC Montréal, and the Montréal Baroque Festival, produced and coordinated a staged version of Antonio Caldara’s La Conversione di Clodoveo re di Francia. The oratorio scenico is based on the conversion of Clovis, the fourth-century king of France. Performances took place in Montréal, Berlin, and Vancouver and featured an all-star Canadian cast (Suzie LeBlanc, Nathalie Paulin, Allyson McHardy, and Matthew White), the instrumental team from Les Voix Lofty Imprecision Is it a good idea to perform well? That is, after all, why we rehearse, and it would be a rare occasion on which performers made a special effort to be uncoordinated, out of tune, or not together in spirit or in detail. And yet, that seems to be what was recommended to practitioners of early music by Bernard Holland in a recent review published in The New York Times. (Never mind what the performance was….) At the end of the review, Holland wrote, “These may have been just the kinds of scratchy semiprofessional conditions that Beethoven in the 1820s had to deal with himself. Early-music period practice at its purest? Who knows?” The issue is whether Beethoven—and by extension other listeners at other times and places in the past—ever heard the kind of spiffy, perfectly-detailed performance we are accustomed to hearing from our top symphony orchestras, piano virtuosi, and the like. If, as Holland seems to suggest, that level of perfect coordination was seldom or never achieved in those days, and if early music folk want to re-create the sounds of the past, it should be part of their job to provide a sort of fuzzy and inaccurate performance in the name of authenticity. There’s a lot to be said here, and I won’t say it all. I can begin with my friend who prefers hearing performances by amateur rather than professional string quartets, claiming that you hear the individual instruments much more clearly when the ensemble isn’t perfect. This may be part of saying that perfection of detail in performance may sometimes lead to a lack of things that make music live in the doing of it. Another thing to be said is that early music, whatever it is, The issue is whether Beethoven ever heard the kind of spiffy, perfectly-detailed performance we are accustomed to. attracted many of us because it is music that we can perform. Lots of Medieval music, lots of Renaissance ensemble music, indeed quite a lot of Baroque chamber music, can be performed by players of moderate ability; there’s not the huge gap between virtuoso and amateur that widened in the 19th century. We can all be glad of that; the players who entertain us are people like ourselves—tomorrow, we may entertain them. I should say, too, that in a sense I’m on the record as agreeing with Mr. Holland. In a book called First Nights: Five Musical Premieres (shameless self-promotion: Yale University Press, paperback version available), I wondered about the quality of the first performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. “The impracticability,” wrote one reviewer, “of devoting sufficient time to the number of rehearsals that were necessary in order to do justice to music which is at once new, and of so lofty a character, made it impossible to give it with that precision, and with those delicate shades of forte and piano, which are required to do them justice.” I pointed out that most concerts of orchestral music were one-off events, underrehearsed by our standards, played by pickup orchestras—and yet that’s what they did, that’s what seems to have suited them, and audiences kept coming. There must have been some fantastic sightreaders in those days. Writing about how one listened to music in a time like that, when one heard lots and lots of new music, though in a familiar style, I said, “Listeners tolerated a foreground of imprecision in order to see the artistic vision. They were not merely listening to the EARLY MUSIC MUSINGS by Thomas Forrest Kelly performance but listening through it to the music itself.” I still believe that. But does that mean that in order to be early musicky we should build in a fair amount of imprecision? Surely not. We should always try to perform as well as we can. We will often come up short, anyway, without half trying to do so. But what we can agree on, I’ll bet, is that if we strive for perfection, we may well achieve something we don’t want, and that if we strive to be in the moment, expressive, and beautiful, we can’t go far wrong. , Thomas Forrest Kelly is a professor of music at Harvard University and a board member and past president of Early Music America. Early Music America Fall 2005 11 MUSIC BEFORE 1800 ŒŒŒŒŒŒŒŒŒŒŒŒŒŒ 31st Season 2005-2006 Œ October 2 October 16 November 6 November 20 December 4 January 29 February 12 February 26 Lionheart Sequentia Galatea Rebel The Choir of Corpus Christi Church Hilliard Ensemble Cello Recital Jaap ter Linden Pomerium According to the New York Times, “The Music Before 1800 concert series…has long offered the most varied and consistently satisfying programs in New York.” Sunday afternoon concerts at Corpus Christi Church 529 West 121 Street, New York City www.mb1800.org Œ Box office/fax 212 666 9266 concerts@mb1800.org h3PECTACULARLY'IFTEDv #$.OW h$ECIDEDLY!DVENTUROUSv 0ITTSBURGH0OST'AZETTE h-ASTERFULv %ARLY-USIC!MERICA #HATHAM"AROQUES4OURING0ROGRAMS &EATURE#HATHAM"AROQUEASATRIOORWITHGUESTSINCLUDING 2ONN-C&ARLANE LUTE#HRIS.ORMANWOODENmUTE 2OSA,EMOREAUX SOPRANO3TEPHEN3CHULTZBAROQUEmUTE "ARBARA7EISSHARPSICHORD$ANNY-ALLONPERCUSSION 2EPRESENTEDBY*ONATHAN7ENTWORTH!SSOCIATES WWWJWENTWORTHCOMCHATHAMCHATHAMHTM WWWCHATHAMBAROQUEORG 12 Fall 2005 Early Music America Baroque, music director Alexander Weimann, Canadian stage director Guillaume Bernardi, and German set designer Cristina Jachinsky. Publishing News Oxford University Press’s Musica Dei donum, a new early music series edited by Sally Dunkley and Francis Steele, aims to present hidden gems of the Renaissance choral repertoire. Each edition will offer clear, clean modern notations, with accompanying notes by pre-eminent performers and performance scholars in the early music field. The British High Court of Appeals upheld last year’s ruling that copyright royalties are due to musicologist Lionel Sawkins for the use of his editions of the 18th-century French composer Michel-Richard de Lalande’s works for a Hyperion label recording entitled Music for the Sun King. Hyperion faces a legal bill of up to £1 million as Sawkins was awarded legal costs for both the initial trial and the appeal as well damages, the amount of which has yet to be determined. Cool Concerts In April, La Favoritte Early Music Ensemble presented “Remembering Peggie Sampson (1912-2004): A Life in Music.” A renowned viola da gambist, Sampson performed with Quatre en concert and was a mentor to the Canadian early music community and a historical performance pioneer. The New York Baroque Dance Company’s performances at the Potsdam Sanssouci Music Festival in June included a private concert for President Horst Koehler of Germany and the 2005 Nobel Laureates. Artistic director Catherine Turocy and her company presented three new works as well as Handel’s ballet Terpsichore. Last spring, Baroque violinist Stanley Ritchie, in a celebration of his 70th birthday, presented a program entitled Stanley Ritchie “Four Seasons and More” as a benefit concert for the Bloomington Early Music Festival. In May, various sites in Chicago heard “The Musicians of Venus and Mercury,” a program featuring an exciting sextet of shawms, recorders, lutes, and viols – the loud winds of Mercury and the soft strings of Venus. Musicians included the Newberry Consort’s Mary Springfels and David Douglass, Piffaro’s Grant Herreid and Tom Zajac, and guest artists Craig Trompeter and Debra Nagy. Pacific Camerata (San Diego, CA), under the direction of Danielle Ratelle, presented “The Cathedral City of Puebla,” an evening of music featuring Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla’s Missa Ave Regina for two choirs, as well as selections by Juan de Araujo, Juan del Encina, and Hernando Franco. ,