BEMF Chamber Ensemble

Paul O’Dette, Musical Director, baroque guitar, & archlute

Paul O’Dette has been called “the clearest case of genius ever to touch his instrument” (Toronto Globe and Mail). He has given solo concerts at dozens of major international festivals across the world while maintaining an active international career as an ensemble musician. Best known for his recitals and recordings of virtuoso solo lute music, Mr. O’Dette has made more than 130 recordings, many of which have been nominated for Gramophone’s “Record of the Year” Award; The Bachelar’s Delight: Lute Music of Daniel Bacheler was nominated for a Grammy as “Best Instrumental Soloist Performance (without Orchestra)” in 2006. Mr. O’Dette is also active conducting Baroque operas. In 1997, he directed performances of Luigi Rossi’s L’Orfeo with Stephen Stubbs at Tanglewood, the Boston Early Music Festival (BEMF), and the Drottningholm Court Theatre in Sweden. They have since co-directed all BEMF operatic performances, including Cavalli’s Ercole Amante (1999), Lully’s Thésée (2001) and Psyché (2007), Conradi’s Ariadne (2003), Mattheson’s Boris Goudenow (2005), and Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea (2009). Three of these operas have been recorded on the CPO label, and all three were nominated for a Grammy in the “Best Opera Recording” category: Ariadne in 2005, Thésée in 2007, and Psyché in 2008. Mr. O’Dette has also conducted performances of Cavalli’s Apollo e Dafne and La Virtù de’ Strali d’Amore, Clarke’s Island Princess, and Franck’s Cecrops. In addition to his activities as a performer, Paul O’Dette is an avid researcher, having worked extensively on the performance and sources of seventeenth-century Italian and English solo song, continuo practices, and lute technique. He has published numerous articles on issues of historical performance practice, and co-authored the John Dowland entry in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Paul O’Dette is Professor of Lute and Director of Early Music at the Eastman School of Music and Artistic Co-Director of the Boston Early Music Festival.

Stephen Stubbs, Musical Director, baroque guitar, & theorbo

After a thirty-year career in Europe, musical director and lutenist Stephen Stubbs recently returned to his native Seattle to establish his new production company, Pacific Musicworks. The company received rave reviews in the national press for its inaugural production of Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse a patria in March 2009, which was designed and stage-directed by South African artist William Kentridge with the Handspring Puppet Company of South Africa. In the coming Pacific Musicworks season, Stubbs will conduct Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespers and Handel’s Esther. With his direction of Stefano Landi’s La Morte d’Orfeo at the 1987 Bruges festival, he began his career as opera director and founded the ensemble Tragicomedia. Stubbs has been invited to direct opera productions in Europe, the U.S., Canada, and Scandinavia. Since 1997, he has co-directed the biennial Boston Early Music Festival opera, and was named permanent artistic co-director in 2003. The Festival’s recordings of Conradi’s Ariadne, Lully’s Thésée, and Lully’s Psyché, have been nominated for Grammy awards in 2005, 2007, and 2008 respectively. In the 2010–2011 season, he will co-direct performances of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, Handel’s Acis and Galatea, and Steffani’s Niobe. Stephen Stubbs created the ensemble Teatro Lirico, who made their recording début in 1996 with the CD Love and Death in Venice. Their début CD on ECM was a New York Times “pick of the year” for 2006. Stubbs’s solo lute recordings include the music of J. S. Bach, S. L. Weiss, David Kellner, and Jaques St. Luc. With Baroque harpist Maxine Eilander he has recorded Sonate al Pizzico, released on ATMA in 2004. He also appears on ECM with the Dowland Project. To cultivate the singers and players of the next generation he founded an early opera course called the Accademia d’Amore in 1997; it is now in Seattle under the auspices of the Seattle Academy of Opera. He will also head a new program in early music at the Cornish College of the Arts.

Robert Mealy, violin I

Robert Mealy is one of America’s leading historical string players; his playing has been praised by the Boston Globe for its “imagination, taste, subtlety, and daring.” He has been honored to lead the Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra under the direction of Stephen Stubbs and Paul O’Dette in three Grammy-nominated recordings and many performances, including a special appearance in Fall 2009 at Versailles. He has recorded and toured in a wide variety of repertoires with many ensembles both here and in Europe, including Sequentia, Ensemble Project Ars Nova, The Newberry Consort, the Folger Consort, Tragicomedia, Les Arts Florissants, and the Handel and Haydn Society. He has toured to Moscow with the Mark Morris Dance Group, and accompanied Renée Fleming on the David Letterman Show. A devoted chamber musician, he directs the seventeenth-century ensemble Quicksilver, and is a member of the King’s Noyse, a Renaissance violin band, and the Medieval quartet Fortune’s Wheel. For over a decade he was an instrumental soloist with the Boston Camerata. Mr. Mealy is Professor of Early Music at Yale University, where he directs the Yale Collegium and the School of Music’s postgraduate Baroque ensemble. He is also on the faculty of the Historical Performance Program at Juilliard. Prior to joining Yale, he founded and directed the Harvard Baroque Orchestra. In 2004, he received Early Music America’s Binkley Award for outstanding teaching and scholarship. He has recorded over fifty CDs on most major labels.

Cynthia Miller Freivogel, violin II

Called “a stellar artist by any standard and the orchestra’s obvious sparkplug” by the Denver Post, Cynthia Miller Freivogel is the leader and concertmaster of the Baroque Chamber Orchestra of Colorado, plays with Brandywine Baroque, and is a tenured member of Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra. She is a founding member and second violinist of the Novello Quartet, which is dedicated to the performance of the string quartets of Haydn and his contemporaries on period instruments. Ms. Freivogel frequently performs at Bay Area early music venues with ensembles such as Magnificat, Voices of Music, and American Bach Soloists, and on concert series at Old First, San Francisco Early Music Society, and MusicSources. She spends summers playing violin in the Colorado Music Festival Orchestra in Boulder. Ms. Freivogel received a BA in musicology at Yale University and an MM in violin performance at the San Francisco Conservatory, and is a dedicated and certified Suzuki teacher.

Laura Jeppesen, viola

Laura Jeppesen is a graduate of the Yale School of Music. She is principal violist of Boston Baroque, gambist of the Boston Museum Trio, and plays viola and viola da gamba with the Handel and Haydn Society, Aston Magna, The Carthage Consort, and the Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra and BEMF Chamber Ensemble, as well as rebec and vielle with Blue Heron. She has appeared as soloist under conductors Edo de Waart, Martin Pearlman, Christopher Hogwood, Grant Llewellyn, Seiji Ozawa, and Bernard Haitink. Her extensive discography includes music for solo viola da gamba, the gamba sonatas of J. S. Bach, Buxtehude’s Trio Sonatas opus 1 and 2, Telemann’s Paris Quartets, Rameau’s Pièces de Clavecin en concerts, and music of Marin Marais. She has been a Fulbright Scholar, a Woodrow Wilson Designate, and a Fellow of Radcliffe’s Bunting Institute. She teaches at Wellesley College and Boston University.

Phoebe Carrai, ‘cello

Phoebe Carrai earned her Bachelor and Master of Music degrees from New England Conservatory, and in 1979 won a Beebe Foundation Grant for postgraduate studies in Historical Performance Practice with Nikolaus Harnoncourt at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria. Beginning in 1983, she performed exclusively with Musica Antiqua Köln for ten years, touring and teaching on four continents. Along with the Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra and BEMF Chamber Ensemble, Ms. Carrai now performs regularly with The Arcadian Academy, Philharmonia Baroque, and the FestspielOrchester Göttingen. She is on the faculties of the Juilliard School in New York and the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is a co-director of the International Baroque Insitute at Longy and director of the Harvard Baroque Orchestra at Harvard University. Ms. Carrai has recorded for Avie, Aetma, Deutsche Grammophon, harmonia mundi, Telarc, Decca, and BMG.

Avi Stein, harpsichord

Avi Stein teaches harpsichord, vocal repertoire, and chamber music at Yale University and is the music director at St. Matthew & St. Timothy Episcopal Church in New York. The New York Times described him as “a brilliant organ soloist” in his Carnegie Hall debut. Avi has performed throughout the United States, in Europe, Canada, and Central America. He has also conducted a variety of ensembles including the recent début of the Opera Omnia company in a production of Monteverdi’s The Coronation of Poppea, and a series called the 4x4 festival featuring many of New York’s best Baroque musicians. Avi is currently finishing his doctoral studies in organ and harpsichord at Indiana University, and holds degrees from the Eastman School of Music and the University of Southern California, as well as being the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship for study in Toulouse.