Cincinnati Early Music Festival!

If Early Music is what you want, Cincinnati is the place to be.  Our Early Music scene is growing by leaps and bounds.  We have musicians who want to play it, we have venues who want to present it, we have students who want to learn it, we have historians who want to study it.  And we have audiences who want to hear it.  That, my friends, is what we mean by synergy.  

To showcase this bubbling cauldron of activity, we are proud to announce the first ever Cincinnati Early Music Festival.  The month of February is packed with events taking place all over town.  We have visiting guest artists and scholars, and we have local performers, professional, amateur, and student.  There are traditional concerts and very informal performances, sacred music and secular, Renaissance and Baroque, soloists and ensembles, singers and all manner of instruments—harpsichords, theorbos, viols, recorders, lutes.  This is your chance to sample a wide range from the first thousand years of written music.  New events are still being organized, and will be announced as the information becomes available.

If you are on Facebook, please join the group Cincinnati Early Music Project.  This is a new venture intended to highlight early music performances and venues in Cincinnati.  The group will have all the latest updates on Festival events, and on happenings year round.  

This year’s Festival is being presented under the aegis of Catacoustic Consort, who is generously lending their support for organization and public relations.  But the true spirit of the Festival is one of collaboration, of all the local groups coming together to show off the diversity of possibilities this city has to offer.  We expect that by next year, the Second Annual Cincinnati Early Music Festival will take flight on its own wings.  All of us in Cincinnati will be richer for it. 

Here is the schedule so far.  New events are still being added.

Feb 1.  7:30  Catacoustic Consort with Matthias Maute.  The grand opening for the Festival.  Catacoustic is one of the premier Baroque ensembles in the US, and Matthias Maute is one of the great instrumental virtuosos.  Together they present an evening of recorder, viol, lirone, and theorbo from two centuries of the Baroque.  Details at http://www.catacoustic.com/season2012.html

Feb 3.  2:00  Challenging Performances Series.  CCM professor Awadagin Pratt brings his studio of piano students to Northern Hills Fellowship Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Wyoming for a concert dedicated to composers born in 1685.  (It was a great year for composers—Bach, Handel, Scarletti…)  Details at https://www.facebook.com/events/279504438843699/ (facebook login required).

Feb 10.  3:00  CCM’s professor of voice Mary Stucky, and her husband, professor of guitar and lute Rod Stucky, present a recital of  music from the French courts of Louis XIII and Louis XIV.  This performance is part of the Music in the Chapel series at The Episcopal Church of the Redeemer in Hyde Park.  Details at http://www.redeemer-cincy.org/

Feb 10.  8:00  Classical Revolution presents an Early Music Sampler at the Northside Tavern.  Several local groups will be performing, including Catacoustic Consort, Adastra, the Noyse Merchants, the CCM Early Music Lab, Ubi Caritas, Bill Willits, AND MORE!  Classical Revolution is a nation-wide movement to bring classical music to the people.  It is believed this will be the first time in the country that an entire evening’s offering will be Early Music. 

Feb 13.  6:45  Melisa Bonetti presents her Graduate Recital at CCM.  Among others, she will perform Barbara Strozzi’s L’Eraclito amoroso, accompanied by Triple Baroque Harp. Details at  https://www.facebook.com/events/404108336345625/

Feb 17.  2:30  Xavier Guitar Series welcomes Grammy Award winner David Russell.  His program will include two Sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti, and Couperin’s Vingt-sixième Ordre, and several modern selections.    Details at http://www.xavier.edu/musicseries/

Feb 17.  4:00  Bach Vespers at St. Thomas Episcopal Church in Terrace Park.  The Cincinnati Bach Ensemble and Choir will perform Thomas Tallis’ Lamentations of Jeremiah.  Details at http://bachvespers.wordpress.com/schedule-2/

Feb 19.  12:00 Ubi Caritas, The Band of the Baroque, performs all Telemann at the Christ Church Cathedral’s Music  Live at Lunch series. Details at http://christchurchcincinnati.org/music/musicliveatlunch

Feb 21.  7:00  Bach by Candlelight.  CSO musicians, students, and others present a night of all Bach.  The line-up is still being assembled, so expect the unexpected--word has it that a cello suite will be performed on the mandocello.   This all-acoustic evening will take place at the Monastery, a recording studio in Walnut Hills.  The event is free, but tickets must be reserved in advance.  Details at http://www.facebook.com/events/338284626281843/

Feb 22.  2:30  CCM’s “Thinking About Music” Colloquium brings in Craig Monson, author of Disembodied Voices: Music and Culture in an Early Modern Italian Convent.  He will be discussing Chiara Margarita Cozzolani, a 17^th c composer, with live musicians demonstrating aspects of her work.  Details at http://calendar.uc.edu/wv3/wv3_servlet/urd/run/wv_event.Detail?id=19037927

Feb 23.  10:00am  Symposium on the Music of Tomas Luis de Victoria.  A day-long symposium at the University of Cincinnati, College-Conservatory of Music. Six student presentations. Keynote lectures by Kyle Adams of Indiana University and Miguel Roig-Francolí of CCM. In conjunction with the Cincinnati Early Music Festival. Sponsored by the Music Theory and Musicology Society. Funded by the University Funding Board.  CCM - University of Cincinnati, Baur Room  Details at https://www.facebook.com/events/438103836263583/ (facebook login required).

Feb 24.  3:00  Join us for the grand finale:  the Cincinnati Early Music Festival Benefit Concert!!!

This final concert in the Festival will not only wrap up for this year, it will make next year possible. Tickets begin at $15 (criminally low) and go as high as you would like to donate to ensure next year's Festival will be even better. 

Musicians include Michael Maniaci (countertenor), Rob Turner on Baroque flute, Jennifer Roig-Francoli on Baroque violin, the Cincinnati Bach Ensemble led by Carlton Monroe, Rod Stucky on Baroque guitar, Elizabeth Motter on Baroque harp, Kerrie Caldwell (soprano), and Annalisa Pappano on viola da gamba.

The music will span the centuries of the Renaissance and Baroque eras. The company will be congenial, the venue will be gorgeous: this is the way you wish all afternoons could be spent.  Christ Church Cathedral, downtown.