The Venere Lute Quartet is one of a very small number of professional lute ensembles active today.  It is named after the Italian Renaissance luthier Vendelio Venere of Padua, who, like Stradivarius, was regarded among the finest makers of his age.  Members of the Quartet are busy lute professionals in four of America's leading early music centers (Boston, New York, Chicago and the Twin Cities of Minnesota) who share a love of performing, sholarship, teaching and ensemble playing.  Longtime friends, they began playing as a group while teaching at Lute Society of America Seminars.

    The exquisitely crafted family of Renaissance lutes on which the Quartet performs is all strung in gut.  The instruments are modeled on lutes produced in Venere's workshop and were built by Lawrence K. Brown or Grant Tomlinson.  This set of soprano, alto, tenor and bass lutes is sized according to Pythagorean proportions; that is, relative to the string length of the bass lute, the tenor is three-quarters as long and tuned a perfect fourth higher (i.e., a 4:3 relationship), the alto lute is two-thirds as long and is tuned a perfect fifth higher (3:2), while the soprano lute is half as long and is tuned an octave higher (2:1).  Instrument makers of the Renaissance were strongly influenced by the theoretical and philosophical ideas attibuted to Pythagoras, such as the relationship of pitch to the length of the string sounding it and the belief that the "symphony" of numerical relationships in musical acoustics expressed the orderly workings of the universe in general.  Indeed, for many humanists of the Renaissance, the harmony of the universe was most clearly revealed in the well-tuned, well-struck strings of the lute.

    The Quartet performs a wide range of Renaissance and Baroque masterworks and is actively expanding the surviving lute ensemble repertory with its own arrangements.  In this it follows a tradition of intabulation – the transcription of instrumental and vocal music into tablature (a specific notation for the lute) – that has been handed down from lutenists of the sixteenth century.  The Venere Quartet's work provides opportunities for composers to explore the unique sounds of the lute ensemble, and editions of the Quartet's arrangements allow student, amateur and professional lutenists to keep this ensemble tradition alive.  The Venere Lute Quartet has released a recording, “Sweet Division,” published by the Lute Society of America.

     Gail Gillispie (soprano lute) is a graduate of Oberlin College and the London Early Music Centre.  She studied with Christopher Wilson in London and Pat O’Brien in New York and has performed in Europe, the U.S., and Canada with Jacob Heringman and Andrew Lawrence-King, the Huelgas Ensemble, the Newberry Consort, the Milwaukee Medieval Players and the New York Ensemble for Early Music.  Gail is founder and director of the Scholars of Cambrai, an ensemble based in the Chicago area.  She also sings, composes, and edits music for the Schola Cantorum of St. Peter the Apostle in Chicago and has a number of private lute students.

     Douglas Freundlich (alto lute) launched his lute career in the 1970s with The Greenwood Consort, winning the Erwin Bodky Award in Boston and Musical America's “Young Artist of the Year.” He has performed with the Boston Symphony, Boston Baroque, Swanne Alley, Capriole, Renaissonics and other ensembles.  He currently teaches lute at the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was director of the Early Music Program for many years.  Doug has commissioned and performed many new works for the lute.  He also cross-trains as a bebop bassist, catalogs music manuscripts at the Harvard University Isham Library and teaches a popular course on music cognition at Tufts University.  He has recorded for the Telarc, Titanic and Sine qua non labels.

    Christopher Morrongiello (tenor lute) is a graduate of Mannes College of Music in New York, the Royal College of Music and Oxford University in England.  In 1993 he was a prizewinner in the BBC Radio 2 Young Musician of the Year Competition, and in 1996 he was awarded a Marco Fodella Foundation Scholarship for studies in Milan, Italy.  He is currently completing a doctoral dissertation at Oxford on Elizabethan and Jacobean lute music.  Christopher has toured and recorded with some of Europe's finest early music groups and individual performers, including soprano Emily van Evera, the Taverner Consort and the Dowland Consort.  He teaches lute in Long Island, New York.

    Phillip Rukavina (bass lute) studied with Patrick O’Brien at Sarah Lawrence College in New York and with Hopkinson Smith at the Académie Musical in Villecroze, France, and in Basel, Switzerland, the latter with a grant from the Jerome Foundation.  He received a second award from the Jerome foundation in 2003.  Phillip appears on several CDs with the ensemble Minstrelsy! on Lyrichord Discs’ Early Music Series label.  Phillip is a member of Terzetti and has appeared with the Lyra Concert Baroque Orchestra, Milwaukee Baroque, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Duo Barbi and many other performing groups.  He supplied the solo lute music for the Ballantine Books audiotape release of “The Last Unicorn.”  Phillip is currently a member of the Board of Directors for the Lute Society of America and teaches lute privately in St. Paul, Minnesota.