Announcing the LSA "Seminar East"
The
LSA at Amherst, July 8-16,2007
Connecticut College, New London, CT
To
register contact:
Amherst Early Music
Join
us this Summer for an exciting week of lute playing and camaraderie as the
Lute Society of America and the Amherst Early Music
Festival join forces to present a "hands-on" exploration
of music making in Italy during the 16th and 17th centuries.
Together with our Amherst Festival friends and colleagues, we will perform in the production of Francesco Cavalli's beautiful opera La Calisto. Cavalli was Claudio Monteverdi's successor in Venice. La Calisto combines singers, dancers, plucked strings and other instrumentalists in an aural and visual extravaganza and one heck of a lot of fun! Alex Weimann and Drew Minter are the directors.
The opera is the centerpiece of an in-depth week long solo and ensemble lute experience. The faculty will include the man who wrote the book on continuo, Nigel North, and Venere Lute Quartet members Douglas Freundlich and Phillip Rukavina both known for teaching the lute ensemble class the LSA Summer Seminars.
Any
type of lute is just fine. You won't need to read figures in basso continuo
to take part in the opera performance. All the music will be offered both
in figured bass format and in French tablature versions for all!
Come and discover how the lute enriched the everyday musical life of Renaissance and early Baroque Italy and continues to enrich our own! Pull out your Italian pieces for solo lute (or any others you may have) and bring 'em along - we'll supply the rest. Here's a LSA "Seminar East" sure to satisfy every lutenist, theorbist, archlutenist, Baroque lutenist, Baroque guitarist, citternist, bandorist, Renaissance guitarist, mandorist, mandolinist, etc., etc...
…bring a friend (or two) along!
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To register please click here: Amherst Early Music Questions?
Click here: prukavina@aol.com |
Faculty for A Night at the Opera
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Nigel North was initially inspired into music, at age 7, by the early 60's instrumental pop group "The Shadows". Nigel studied classical music through the violin and guitar, eventually discovering his real path in life, the lute, when he was 15. Basically self taught on the lute, he has (for over 30 years) developed a unique musical life which embraces activities as a teacher, accompanist, soloist, director and writer. Nigel also enjoys accompanying singers and is an enthusiastic teacher. For over 20 years he was Professor of Lute at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, in London; from 1993-1999 he was Professor at the Hochschule der Künste, Berlin and since January 1999 Nigel North has been Professor of Lute at the Early Music Institute of Indiana University, Bloomington in the USA. "I remember going to a remarkable recital, one which I wish I had the ability to give: it was one of Nigel North's Bach recitals, and I was bowled over by how masterful and how musical it was. A real musical experience, something you don't always get from guitar and lute players and which, in general, is pretty rare." Julian Bream (London, 2002) in a
talk given to the Lute Society |
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Douglas Freundlich launched his lute career in the 1970s with The Greenwood Consort, winning the Erwin Bodky Award and Musical America’s “Young Artist of the Year.” He has performed with the Boston Symphony, Boston Baroque, Swanne Alley, Capriole, Renaissonics, and others. He teaches lute at the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, MA, where he directed the Early Music Program in the 1980s. Doug has commissioned and performed many new works for the lute. He also cross-trains as a bebop bassist, catalogs music manuscripts at Harvard’s Isham Library, and teaches a popular course on music cognition at Tufts. He has recorded for the Telarc, Titanic, and Sine Qua Non labels.
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Phillip Rukavina has performed widely as a lute and vihuela soloist, ensemble performer and as a continuo lutenist. He studied lute with Patrick O'Brien at Sarah Lawrence College and Hopkinson Smith at the Academie Musical in Villecroze, France and in Basel, Switzerland. He was the Director of the Lute Society of America's summer program at the Amherst Early Music Festival in 2005, and regularly serves on the faculty of the Lute Society of America's Seminars at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. He has released two solo recordings on the Alpha Omega label, including Fiori Italiani and Ala spagnola. Phillip has been a frequent guest instrumentalist with the Rose Ensemble and appears on their recent CD release, Celebremos el Niño. Phillip has performed with numerous instrumental ensembles, including the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and the New World Symphony and appears on several recordings issued on the Lyrichord Discs Early Music label with the ensemble Minstrelsy! Phillip teaches lute privately at his home in St. Paul, Minnesota. |
