Mary Springfels
Director of Severall Friends
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Director of Severall Friends
Mary Springfels is a veteran of the American early music movement. She began
her career at the age of 21 with the New York Pro Musica, and has played with most of the major ensembles in the field, including the Waverly Consort…
Mary Springfels is a veteran of the American early music movement. She began
her career at the age of 21 with the New York Pro Musica, and has played with most of the major ensembles in the field, including the Waverly Consort, The Folger Consort, Philharmonia Baroque, the Seattle Baroque Orchestra, Musica Sacra of New York, and Pomerium Musices, to name a few. In 1983 she became Musicianin-Residence at the Newberry Library, and was the director of the Newberry Consort for 20 years. In 2008, she fulfilled a lifelong dream, and moved to New Mexico. Since then, she has travelled widely, working with Sonoma Bach, the Lobo Baroque Orchestra, the Arizona Bach Society, Ars Lyrica of Houston, The Texas Early Music Project of Austin, and continues to work with Drew Minter, and her beloved colleagues at the Folger Consort. She can be heard on dozens of recordings. Springfels is also a very active teacher and coach. She and Elizabeth Blumenstock are Co-Directors of the newlyfounded Severall Friends, based in Santa Fe.
Director of Severall Friends
Elizabeth Blumenstock is a concertmaster, soloist, and leader with the Bay Area’s Philharmonia Baroque and American Bach Soloists, the International Handel Festival in Goettingen, Germany, and is Artistic Director of the Corona del Mar Baroque Music Festival
Elizabeth Blumenstock is a concertmaster, soloist, and leader with the Bay Area’s Philharmonia Baroque and American Bach Soloists, the International Handel Festival in Goettingen, Germany, and is Artistic Director of the Corona del Mar Baroque Music Festival in Southern California. She is a member of several chamber ensembles including Musica Pacifica, Galax Quartet, Live Oak Baroque, and Voices of Music. Ms. Blumenstock teaches regularly for the Juilliard Historical Performance program, at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and the American Bach Soloists’ summer Festival and Academy. She plays a 1660 Andrea Guarneri violin built in Cremona, Italy, on generous loan to her from the Philharmonia Baroque Period Instrument Trust.
Dubbed a “basso continuo wizard” by Gramophone (UK), David Morris has made a specialty of performing 17th- and 18th-c. music on a variety of historical bass instruments including the viola da gamba, baroque cello, bass violin and lirone.
Dubbed a “basso continuo wizard” by Gramophone (UK), David Morris has made a specialty of performing 17th- and 18th-c. music on a variety of historical bass instruments including the viola da gamba, baroque cello, bass violin and lirone. He has performed in the U.S. and abroad with the Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra, Tafelmusik, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Mark Morris Dance Group. He has recorded for Harmonia Mundi, Drag City Records (Joanna Newsom’s double-CD, Have One on Me), CBC/ Radio-Canada and New Line Cinema (as viola da gamba soloist for The Nativity Story). He is a frequent coach at the Viola da Gamba Society of America’s regional workshops as well at its national Conclaves, and has also taught at the Amherst and Madison Early Music Workshops.
Lawrence Lipnik has performed with many acclaimed early music ensembles from Anonymous 4 to Piffaro and the Waverly Consort, and is a founding member of the viol consort Parthenia and vocal ensemble Lionheart.
Lawrence Lipnik has performed with many acclaimed early music ensembles from Anonymous 4 to Piffaro and the Waverly Consort, and is a founding member of the viol consort Parthenia and vocal ensemble Lionheart. He has prepared an authoritative edition of Francesco Cavalli’s La Calisto, commissioned by the Juilliard School, served as gambist and recorder player for staged opera productions including Monteverdi’s Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria at Wolf Trap and Telemann’s Orpheus with the New York City Opera. In addition to performing, he enjoys a busy teaching schedule which has included national and international festivals including the Benslow Music Trust in the UK, Port Townsend, San Diego and Madison Early Music Festivals, Pinewoods, Collegium Director at Amherst Early Music, viol, recorder and early music performance instruction at Wesleyan University and is a contributor to The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Contemporary Dramatists. Highlights from this past season have included performances with lutenist Paul O’dette of Dowland’s complete Lachrimae collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, concerts at the Berkeley Festival, appearances with ARTEK, TENET, the Indiana University Historic Performance Institute at the Bloomington Early Music Festival and early opera residency at Carnegie Mellon University.
Countertenor and Instrumentalist Mark Rimple has garnered critical notice for his interpretation of early music from national newspapers and journals including the Philadelphia Inquirer, The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune…
Countertenor and Instrumentalist Mark Rimple has garnered critical notice for his interpretation of early music from national newspapers and journals including the Philadelphia Inquirer, The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post, Early Music America, Fanfare, and Early Music (UK). He is adept on stringed instruments and performs regularly on the gittern, citole, lute, archlute psaltery, tenor viol, bandora and cittern. With Drew Minter and Marcia Young, he is a founding member of Trefoil and a regular guest artist with the Newberry Consort and The Folger Consort, and has appeared with Piffaro, the Renaissance Band, The King’s Noyse, Ex Umbris (at the Clinton White House), New York’s Ensemble for Early Music, Mélomanie, Pomerium, Network for New Music, Cygnus Ensemble and the GEMS production of The Play of Daniel. He is currently working on a CD of Italian music for gittern, lute and archlute, and has just completed a new CD of Renaissance vocal chamber music with his ensemble Musica Humana Vocal Consort. Mark is a composer whose works often incorporate early instruments and techniques. His music has been performed by Parnassus, ChoralArts Philadelphia, Piffaro, The League of Composers/ISCM, Mélomanie, Network for New Music, and The 21st Century Consort; his debut solo composition CD, January: Songs and Chamber Music of Mark Rimple <http://www.newfocusrecordings.com/catalogue/january-songs-chamber-music-of-mark-rimple/> (Furious Artisans) includes works for archlute, countertenor, viola da gamba and harpsichord. As a theorist, he has written on the reception of Boethius in 14th – 17th century music and literature. Dr. Rimple is Professor in the Department of Music Theory, Composition and History at West Chester University of Pennsylvania.
Born on St Cecilia’s day, the Grammy-nominated British counter-tenor Ryland Angel has built an international reputation on both the opera and concert stage, in repertoire ranging from the Baroque to new operatic commissions at major opera houses…
Born on St Cecilia’s day, the Grammy-nominated British counter-tenor Ryland Angel has built an international reputation on both the opera and concert stage, in repertoire ranging from the Baroque to new operatic commissions at major opera houses, concert halls and festivals throughout Europe and the USA. He has performed in Monteverdi’s Orfeo, Gavin Bryars’s Doctor Ox’s Experiment (English National Opera), Fairy Queen (Barcelona), Gluck’s Orfeo (Koblenz), Amadigi (Karlsruhe), Venus and Adonis (Flanders Opera), Dido and Aeneas (Opera Comique), The Play of Daniel (Spoleto), and Ballet Comique de La Royne (Geneva). Angel has sung on over 70 recordings including music of Buxtehude, Charpentier, Scarlatti, Stradella, Spears, O’Regan, Handel, Monteverdi, Purcell, Bach and film soundtracks of Zoolander 2, Freedom, Le Petit Prince, La Peau, Henry 4th, Machete, The Mystery of Dante and the PBS TV special Heavenly Voices. Recent engagements include Doux Mensonges (Opera National de Paris), Agrippina(NYCO), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Florentine and Kansas Opera), Julius Caesar (Utah and Colorado Opera, Boston Baroque), Sant Alessio (Paris, London, New York), Carmina Burana (Lincoln Center and Prague Proms with CNSO), St. John Passion (Saint Thomas and Worcester Chorus), Classics and Rock (Seoul Philharmonic), Tesla (Dartmouth), Striggio with Le Concert Spiriuel (Edinburgh Festival), Acis and Galatea (Houston) and Messiah (Handel and Haydn Society, Masterworks Chorus, Musica Sacra). CD releases this year include The Flaming Fire (MSR) and Heart and Soul (Centaur) and La Sposa (Solo Luminus). RylandAngel.com.
Gary Thor Wedow has established a reputation for historically informed performances with choral organizations, opera companies and symphony orchestras across North America. A frequent guest of Berkshire Chorus International, he has…
Gary Thor Wedow has established an enviable reputation for dramatically exciting and historically informed performances with choral organizations, opera companies and symphony orchestras across North America. A frequent guest of Berkshire Chorus International, he has joined them in Salzburg and Santa Fe and recently led the Westminster Choir College and the
Juilliard Orchestra in the Mozart Requiem at Alice Tully Hall. He has collaborated with many historic performance ensembles including Portland Baroque, Amherst Early Music Festival, Parthenia and the Juilliard Historic Performance Orchestra where he recently led the St. Matthew Passion on tour and at Alice Tully Hall. Along with Lawrence Lipnik,, gambist, they have led the New York premiere of Telemann’s Orpheus, La Calisto for Carnegie Mellon University and the Canadian Opera Company and Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria for Wolf Trap Opera and conducted many other Baroque operas for major opera companies including The New York City Opera, Seattle Opera, etc. His performances of Messiah have taken him from the podium of the New York Philharmonic and the Santa Fe Symphony to the early music orchestras of St Thomas Episcopal Church and Portland Baroque Orchestra. For 10 years he was the Associate Conductor of Boston’s Handel and Haydn Society and is currently on the faculty of The Juilliard School and is a frequent guest of other professional and amateur training programs including the Jacobs School of Music, Merola Opera and the Teatro Colon. Recent performances include Monteverdi’s Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda in a double bill with Lembit Beecher’s new opera I Have No Stories to Tell You for Opera Philadelphia. Upcoming projects include L’incoronazione di Poppea for Cincinnati Opera in conjunction with Catacoustic Consort.
General Manager
An immigrant to New Mexico from the flatland of Illinois, Severall Friends Treasurer and General Manager Ken Perlow is a semi-professional gambist who has been a guest artist with the Newberry Consort, Ars Musica Chicago, the Chicago Early Music Consort…
An immigrant to New Mexico from the flatland of Illinois, Severall Friends Treasurer and General Manager Ken Perlow is a semi-professional gambist who has been a guest artist with the Newberry Consort, Ars Musica Chicago, the Chicago Early Music Consort, Catacoustic Consort, Second City Musick, Ensemble Musical Offering, and the Illinois Philharmonic. He studied viola da gamba performance at Roosevelt University with Mary Springfels. Ken served as Treasurer of the Viola da Gamba Society of America from 1996 to 2014, Manager of the Newberry Consort from 2004 to 2009, and Interim Executive Director of Early Music America in 2001-02, after retiring from a career as a computer engineer and business consultant at Bell Laboratories. Ken currently serves on the boards of directors of his wireless internet service cooperative and his synagogue in Santa Fe. He is an avid student of Renaissance neo-Platonism, slowly working on an English translation of Robert Fludd’s 1621 pamphlet Veritatis Proscenium, an occultist critique of the revolutionary 1619 scientific treatise Harmonices Mundi of Johannes Kepler.
Violinist Stephen Redfield, D.M.A., is a member of the University of Southern Mississippi School of Music faculty, where he performs with the Mississippi Chamber Circle and the Impromptu Piano Trio. Throughout the year Stephen acts as concertmaster of Santa Fe Pro Musica…
Violinist Stephen Redfield, D.M.A., is a member of the University of Southern Mississippi School of Music faculty, where he performs with the Mississippi Chamber Circle and the Impromptu Piano Trio. Throughout the year Stephen acts as concertmaster of the Santa Fe Pro Musica, and each summer plays with the Victoria Bach Festival; his performances as concertmaster and soloist there have been produced on discs and broadcast nationally. He has also often led the Oregon Bach Festival orchestra, where he has participated in numerous recordings, including the Grammy Award-winning disc “Credo.” In addition, Stephen is concertmaster of the Arizona Bach Festival, was the long-time principal second violin of the Sunriver Music Festival, and served for five years as Assistant Concertmaster of the Austin Symphony Orchestra.
Stephen has particularly extensive experience in the choral-orchestral repertoire: over his 30 years with the Oregon Bach Festival, he performed the majority of this repertoire with Helmuth Rilling (including recording eight works, and premiering two commissioned pieces). He is concertmaster for Craig Hella Johnson and the coral ensemble Conspirare. He has led a period B Minor Mass for Joshua Habermann and the Santa Fe Desert Chorale, and was concertmaster for Robert Shaw in the Berlioz Requiem and for Fiora Contino in Haydn’s Creation and the St. John Passion.
Stephen is an active chamber musician throughout the United States and abroad. He has collaborated with artists Andre-Michel Schub, Peter Wiley and Mark Peskanov. His Cayuga Quartet was a winner of the Coleman and Monterey Chamber Music Competitions and earned an Aspen Quartet Fellowship. In addition to the festivals mentioned before, Stephen has been featured in chamber concerts at Loon Lake Live!, Taos Soundscapes, Serenata of Santa Fe, Quad-Cities Mozart Festival, and the Anchorage Festival, among others. He coached with the Cleveland Quartet and Abram Loft, the Emerson Quartet and Earl Carlyss, and the LaSalle and Audubon Quartets.
He frequently performs as a soloist; during 2009, Mendelssohn’s 200th birth-year, he performed both Mendelssohn violin concertos (and also toured with his three sonatas). His specialty is 18th and early 19th-Century concertos and concert pieces, often leading the ensemble while playing the solo. Highlights include Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, each of the Bach Concertos, and selected concertos and works by Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn. He also performed a Western-U.S. premiere of the Michael Daugherty’s “Ladder to the Moon.”
Stephen has also developed a specialization in period performance. He performs regularly as a Baroque violinist, including as a member of the Atlanta Baroque Orchestra, and he has led the ensembles Albuquerque Baroque Players and Nashville’s Music City Baroque. Stephen’s Baroque chamber music credits include concerts with Marion Verbruggen, Mary Springfels, Elizabeth Blumenstock and Kenneth Slowik., and with the Newberry Consort and the Smithsonian Chamber Players. As a member of the Sebastian Ensemble, with harpsichordist Kathleen McIntosh, Stephen travelled twice to Lima, Peru, for the Festival Internacional de Música Antigua. Specializing in J.S. Bach’s Sonatas for Violin and Harpsichord Obligato, this period performance group has toured throughout the United States as well as in Spain, Japan and Cuba.
Multi-instrumentalist Shira Kammen has spent well over half her life exploring early and other intriguing styles of music. A member for many years of the early music Ensembles Alcatraz and Project Ars Nova…
Multi-instrumentalist Shira Kammen has spent well over half her life exploring early and other intriguing styles of music. A member for many years of the early music Ensembles Alcatraz and Project Ars Nova, Medieval Strings, and Fortune’s Wheel, she has also worked with Sequentia, Hesperion XX, the Boston Camerata, the Balkan group Kitka, Anonymous IV, the King’s Noyse, the Newberry and Folger Consorts, Tenet, the Rose Ensemble, Parthenia, the Oregon, California and San Francisco Shakespeare Festivals, and is the founder of Class V Music, an ensemble dedicated to providing music on river rafting trips. She has performed and taught in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Europe, Israel, Morocco, Latvia, Russia, Abu Dhabi and Japan, and on the Colorado, Rogue, Green, Grande Ronde, East Carson and Klamath Rivers.
Shira happily collaborated with singer/storyteller John Fleagle for fifteen years, and with her medieval music mentor Margriet Tindemans for thirty years, and performs now with several groups, including a new music ensemble, Ephemeros; an English Country Dance/Contradance band, Roguery; the early music ensembles Sitka Trio, Calextone and In Bocca al Lupo, Vajra Voices, the chamber chorus Gallimaufry, as well as frequent collaborations with performers such as storyteller/harpist Patrick Ball,, singer Anne Azema, fiddler Kaila Flexer, poets Jane Hirshfield and Kay Ryan, clown Jeff Raz, and in many theatrical and dance productions, including the California Revels and The American Repertory Ballet Company. Shira has been involved with the California Revels since 1989, and has served as associate music director for nearly 2 decades. She has worked with students in many different settings, among them teaching summer music workshops in the woods, coaching students of early music in such schools as Yale University, Case Western, the University of Oregon at Eugene, Boston University, and instructing at specialized seminars at the Fondazione Cini in Venice, Italy and the Scuola Cantorum Basiliensis in Switzerland.
She has played on several television and movie soundtracks, including ‘O’, a modern high school-setting of Othello and ‘’The Nativity Story’, and has accompanied many diverse artists in recording projects, among them singers Azam Ali, Joanna Newsom, and David Hidalgo of Los Lobos. Some of her original music can be heard in an independent film about fans of the work of JRR Tolkien. The strangest place Shira has played is in the elephant pit of the Jerusalem Zoo.
BS, Indiana University. Diploma in Lieder and Oratorio from the Hochschule der Musik in Vienna, Austria…
Regarded for over three decades as one of the world’s finest countertenors, Drew Minter grew up as a boy treble in the Washington Cathedral Choir of Men and Boys. After obtaining music degrees at Bloomington, Indiana and Vienna, Austria, Minter appeared in leading roles with the opera companies of Brussels, Toulouse, Boston, Washington, Santa Fe, Wolf Trap, Glimmerglass, and Nice, among others. A recognized specialist in the works of Handel, he has performed frequently at the Handel festivals of Göttingen, Halle, Karlsruhe, and Maryland. He has sung with many of the world’s leading baroque orchestras, including Les Arts Florissants, the Handel and Haydn Society, Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, Freiburger Barockorchester, and as a guest at festivals such as Tanglewood, Ravinia, Regensburg, BAM’s Next Wave, Edinburgh, Spoleto, and Boston Early Music; other orchestra credits include the Philadelphia Orchestra, the San Francisco Orchestra and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. Mr. Minter was a founding member of the Newberry Consort, with whom he performed, toured and recorded for twenty-five years. He is also a founding member of the medieval trio TREFOIL, with whom he tours frequently, singing and playing early harps. The ensemble specializes in music of the 14th century. Other early music ensembles with which Mr. Minter frequently collaborates are My Lord Chamberlain’s Consort, ARTEK, and the Folger Consort. Mr. Minter has made over 60 recordings on Harmonia Mundi, Decca/London, Newport Classics, Hungaroton and others. He appears in two films: as Tolomeo in Peter Sellars’s Giulio Cesare, and as the Devil in In the Symphony of the World; a Portrait of Hildegard of Bingen.
Drew Minter is also a lauded stage director. He began as director of the operas at the Göttingen Händel Festival for five years, directing period baroque productions. Since then he has directed productions in many styles for the Opéra de Marseilles, Caramoor, the Boston Early Music Festival, the Cloisters Museum, Lake George Opera, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, Handel and Haydn, Boston’s Opera Aperta, the Manhattan School of Music, Mannes School of Music, Boston University’s Opera Institute, Amherst Early Music, the Folger Shakespeare Theatre, the Five Colleges in Northampton, Tempesta di Mare and Cleveland’s Apollo’s Fire. In 2006 he was made Artistic Director of Boston Midsummer Opera, a summer opera company he co-founded to provide outreach through excellent and inventive productions of opera in translation (many of them in Minter’s own English translations). There he has directed Peter Brook’s Tragedy of Carmen, Mozart’s Così fan tutte, and pastiches of Offenbach and Mozart.
In addition to numerous workshops in the vocal and dramatic performance of baroque music, Mr. Minter has taught voice for the past ten years at Vassar College, where he also directs the Vassar Opera Workshop and conducts the Vassar Madrigal Singers. He has taught since 1989 at the Amherst Early Music Institute. In addition to an active singing career of his own, he teaches frequent masterclasses in opera and oratorio; in recent years these have taken place at Indiana University, Boston University, the University of Massachusetts, West Chester University and the Crittendon Opera Workshops in Boston.