2022-2023 Artists
Julie Andrijeski
Julie Andrijeski is celebrated as a performer, scholar, and teacher of early music and dance. She has been recognized for her “invigorating verve and imagination” (Washington Post), “fiery and poetic depth” (Cleveland Plain Dealer), and “velvety, consistently attractive sound”(New York Times). Julie is Artistic Director of the Atlanta Baroque Orchestra, founding member of Apollo’s Fire, Creator and Director of the Wonder Chamber Project, and a frequent guest with various ensembles nationwide. Julie joined the Music faculty at CWRU in 2007, where she teaches historical performance and directs the baroque music and dance ensembles. Julie is frequently invited to present workshops in historical dance and music throughout the U.S. She won EMA’s Thomas Binkley Award for outstanding achievement in performance and scholarship in 2015, was named a 2016 Creative Workforce Fellow by Cuyahoga Arts & Culture, and was awarded a Grammy for “Songs of Orpheus “with Apollo’s Fire in 2018.
cynthia black
Violinist and violist Cynthia Keiko Black enjoys a varied musical life across the United States and at home in the Bay Area. She is often seen performing with INCANTARE, an ensemble of violins and sackbuts, and looks forward to appearances with Chatham Baroque, Ars Minerva, Portland Baroque Orchestra, Pacific MusicWorks, Les Délices, and Acronym this season. She can be heard on recordings with Apollo's Fire, the American Bach Soloists, and the Queen's Rebels, and will be releasing an album of rarely heard duos for violin and viola from the late eighteenth century later this year. Cynthia also teaches a studio of young people at the Crowden School’s Community Program in Berkeley, and holds modern viola degrees from the Cleveland Institute of Music and a doctorate in Historical Performance Practice from Case Western Reserve University. She enjoys cooking projects, watercoloring, and growing vegetables at home in Richmond, California where she lives with her trumpet-playing and harpsichord-building husband Dominic Favia.
Elena Mullins Bailey
Praised for her “alluring” performances and “easy virtuosity,” soprano Elena Mullins Bailey has wide-ranging interests in the field of early music. As a performer of period chamber music she has appeared with The Newberry Consort, Three Notch’d Road, Les Délices, and Apollo’s Fire. She takes a scholarly interest in the performance practices of early repertoires, and co-founded the medieval music ensembles Alkemie and Trobár. She holds a DMA in Historical Performance Practice and a BA in Musical Arts from The Eastman School of Music. She returned to CWRU in 2016, where she directs the Early Music Singers and the Baroque Dance Ensemble, and teaches medieval music history and notation.
Jean Bernard Cerin
Praised for his “burnished tone and focused phrasing,” (Chestnut Hill Local) baritone Jean Bernard Cerin has charmed audiences throughout the United States, France, Austria, and his native Haiti. A gifted recitalist, Jean Bernard was awarded the 2022 Musical Fund Society Career Advancement Award in Philadelphia including a solo debut recital with the Philadelphia Chamber Music society. He won the Gerard Souzay Prize for best performance of a French Mélodie at the Joy in Singing International Song Competition in 2018. On the concert stage, Jean Bernard has appeared with leading early music ensembles throughout the United States including Philadelphia based Choral Arts, Piffaro Renaissance Wind Ensemble, Tempesta di Mare Baroque Orchestra, Night Music, Philadelphia Chamber Music Society’s Gamut Bach Ensemble, Louisville’s Bourbon Baroque, Classical Uncorked in Seattle, and American Bach Soloists in San Francisco. Jean Bernard directed a documentary Lisette (2022) that explores the history of the oldest song in Haitian Creole.
Anna Danilevskaia
Anna Danilevskaia, fiddle and Renaissance viol player, specialist in repertoires from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, was born into a family of musicians. She grew up surrounded by early music, specifically medieval repertoires, in Metz, France, and began her musical training at the age of six playing different instruments. At the age of fifteen she started to play the fiddle and, shortly after, the viola da gamba. In 2014 she founded her own group, Sollazzo, dedicated to the music of the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance. Sollazzo's CD recordings have received accolades such as the Diapason d’Or, Disc of the Year by The Art Desks, Editor’s Choice by Grammophone, Critic’s Choice by De Standaard, CD of Choice by BBC Magazine, as well as the Diapason d’Or de l’Année for the years 2017 and 2021.
Hannah De Priest
Possessing a “voice that is theater itself” (Classique News), soprano Hannah De Priest is a fearless performer of an ever-widening range of lyric repertoire. Especially renowned for her “masterful" (Olyrix) singing of baroque opera, recent stage triumphs include her "winning" (DC Classical Review) Kennedy Center debut with Opera Lafayette (Serpine, La servante maîtresse) and her European debut as Gilde in L’amazzone corsara (Innsbruck Early Music Festival). With her "glittering, easy soprano" (Merkur), Hannah has garnered attention at numerous important competitions, winning 2nd Prize at the 2021 International Cesti Competition for Baroque Opera. On the concert stage, recent engagements include Handel’s Messiah with Apollo Chorus & Orchestra, Bach’s Johannes-Passion with Columbus Symphony, and Handel’s Dixit Dominus with the Elgin Symphony. Hannah is thrilled to be featured soloist with Les Délices for their performance at the 2023 Boston Early Music Festival.
Mark Edwards
First prize winner in the 2012 Musica Antiqua Bruges International Harpsichord Competition, Canadian harpsichordist and organist Mark Edwards is recognized for his captivating performances, bringing the listener “to new and unpredictable regions, using all of the resources of his instrument, […] of his virtuosity, and of his imagination” (La Libre Belgique). An active chamber musician, he is the artistic director of Poiesis, collaborates regularly with Les Boréades de Montréal, and has performed with Il Pomo d’Oro, Pallade Musica, and Flûtes Alors!. He has also given solo recitals at the Utrecht Early Music Festival and Brussels’ Bozar and performed concertos with a number of award-winning ensembles, including Il Gardellino (Belgium), Neobarock (Germany), and Ensemble Caprice (Canada). He is currently a PhD student at Leiden University and the Orpheus Instituut, Ghent, where his research examines the intersection of memory, improvisation, and the musical work in seventeenth-century France. Since 2016, he is Assistant Professor of Harpsichord at Oberlin Conservatory.
Emi Ferguson
Emi Ferguson, flute, can be heard live in concerts and festivals with groups including the Handel and Haydn Society, AMOC*, the New York New Music Ensemble, and the Manhattan Chamber Players. Emi’s recordings for Arezzo Music, Fly the Coop: Bach Sonatas and Preludes with Ruckus (2019) and Amour Cruel (2017) were amongst the top 10 albums on the Classical and World Music Billboard Charts and showcase Emi’s fascination with reinvigorating music and instruments of the past for the present. Emi has spoken and performed at several TEDX events and has been featured on media outlets including the Discovery Channel, Amazon Prime, and Vox talking about how music relates to our world today. Born in Japan and raised in London and Boston, she now resides in New York City.
Sydney Guillaume
Praised by the Miami Herald for their “impressive maturity and striking melodic distinction”, Sydney Guillaume’s compositions are known to be intricate, challenging and yet highly spirited. They promote human values and are full of heart and passion. His compositions continually enthrall choirs everywhere and have been performed around the world. They have been featured at numerous conferences and international festivals like the American Choral Directors Association (ACDA), the World Choir Games and Ireland’s Cork International Choral Festival. Guillaume also writes film music – he has written original film and documentary scores for the Los Angeles based company Loyola Productions.
Scott Metcalfe
Scott Metcalfe is the director of Blue Heron, acclaimed by The Boston Globe as “one of the Boston music community’s indispensables,” winner of the 2018 Gramophone Classical Music Award for Early Music and the 2015 Noah Greenberg Award. He was music director of New York City’s Green Mountain Project from 2010-19 and has been guest director of TENET, the Handel & Haydn Society, the Tudor Choir and Seattle Baroque, Pacific Baroque Orchestra, Quire Cleveland, and the Dryden Ensemble. Metcalfe also enjoys a career as a baroque violinist, playing with Les Délices (dir. Debra Nagy), L’Harmonie des Saisons (dir. Eric Milnes), and other ensembles. He has edited songs from the Leuven Chansonnier for the Alamire Foundation (Belgium) and is the author of several recently-published essays on performance practice. He has taught at Boston University, Harvard University, the New England Conservatory, and Oberlin Conservatory.
Allison Monroe
A multi-instrumentalist, Allison Monroe has appeared with the Boston Camerata, Newberry Consort, Les Délices, Apollo’s Fire, Atlanta Baroque Orchestra, and Indianapolis Baroque Orchestra, playing violin, viola, vielle, rebec, and singing. Since earning her DMA in Historical Performance Practice from Case Western Reserve University (CWRU), Allison particularly enjoys creating her own musical opportunities: as Artistic Director and performer for Fair and Princely Branches, an album of English Renaissance music, released in 2020; as violinist and violist on an album of classical and early romantic duos with multi-instrumentalist Cynthia Black, recorded in July 2021; and as a founding member and co-director of Cleveland-based medieval ensemble Trobár. In the 2021-22 season, Allison looks forward to resuming live performances as a freelancer, presenting Trobár’s Cleveland series and a residency at Purdue University, Fort Wayne, teaching courses for the Siegal Lifelong Learning Center at CWRU, and directing CWRU’s Collegium Musicum and Baroque Orchestra.
Tracy Mortimore
Tracy Mortimore performs extensively on modern and historical double basses and violone. He has performed with Santa Fe Pro Musica, Washington Bach Consort, Musica Pro Rara, Tafelmusik, Opera Atelier, Toronto Consort, Seattle Baroque, Wolftrap Opera, Chatham Baroque, Folger Consort, Tempesta di Mare, Pegasus, NYSEMA and Aradia Ensemble with whom he has made over 50 recordings. Tracy has performed in New Zealand, Singapore, Switzerland, England, Japan, Italy and across the United States and Canada. Tracy currently resides in Cleveland where in addition to his work in early music, he is actively involved with contemporary classical and jazz movements as an improviser and composer.
Debra Nagy
“A baroque oboist of consummate taste and expressivity” (Cleveland Plain Dealer) with a musical approach that’s “distinctly sensual…pliant, warm, and sweet,” (New York Times), Debra Nagy, director, is one of North America’s leading performers on the baroque oboe. She plays principal oboe with the American Bach Soloists, Seattle Baroque Orchestra, and Apollo’s Fire, and is a regular guest with the Handel & Haydn Society, Boston Early Music Festival, and Portland Baroque Orchestra, among other ensembles. Following studies at the Oberlin Conservatory, Conservatory of Amsterdam, and Case Western Reserve University, Debra has received many awards for her creative and scholarly pursuits including first-prize in the American Bach Soloists Young Artists Competition, a 2009 Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a 2010 Creative Workforce Fellowship from Cuyahoga Arts & Culture. She has recorded over 30 CDs with repertoire ranging from 1300-1800 on the Chandos, Avie, CPO, Capstone, Bright Angel, Naxos, and ATMA labels, and has had live performances featured on CBC Radio Canada, Klara (Belgium), NPR’s Performance Today, WQXR (New York City) and WGBH Boston.
Sherezade Panthaki
Sherezade Panthaki, soprano, is internationally celebrated for her performances of early music and oratorio, enjoying ongoing collaborations with many of the world’s leading interpreters including Nicholas McGegan, Masaaki Suzuki, Mark Morris, Stephen Stubbs, and more. Recent engagements include performances with the New York Philharmonic, Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, Bach Collegium Japan, Wiener Akademie (Austria), NDR Hannover Radiophilharmonie (Germany), the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Boston Early Music Festival, Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra (Canada), Houston Symphony, and the Mark Morris Dance Group. Born and raised in India, Ms. Panthaki holds an Artist Diploma from the Yale School of Music, and a Masters in Vocal Performance from the University of Illinois. She is a founding member and Artistic Advisor of the newly-debuted Kaleidoscope Vocal Ensemble, celebrating racial and ethnic diversity in performances/ educational programs of early and new music. Ms. Panthaki is a renown clinician, has taught voice at Yale University, and currently heads the Vocal program at Mount Holyoke College.
Jacob Perry
Jacob Perry, tenor, has been praised for his “gorgeous and stylish” (clevelandclassical.com) interpretations of Renaissance and Baroque repertoire. He has been featured as a soloist with Apollo's Fire, Portland Baroque Orchestra, Tempesta di Mare, Washington Bach Consort, and the Washington National Cathedral. Deeply immersed in vocal chamber music, Jacob enjoys active membership in Les Canards Chantants as well as engagements with ensembles such as ARTEK, TENET Vocal Artists, and Yale Choral Artists. Career highlights include multiple tours performing in Roman Basilicas with the choir of the National Shrine, headlining the inaugural festival of Western Early Music at the Beijing Central Conservatory of Music with Les Canards Chantants, and “English Orpheus”—a tour de force exploration of love songs and poems from the Elizabethan, Restoration, and early 18th-century periods he performed with Tempesta di Mare. This past summer, Jacob was the tenor participant in the Virginia Best Adams Masterclass for the 2022 Carmel Bach Festival.
Amanda Powell
Amanda Powell, soprano, enjoys a diverse performance career that includes classical, jazz, and folk music performance. She has appeared as soloist with Cleveland's Baroque Orchestra, Apollo’s Fire numerous times including in Bach’s Mass in B Minor, Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, and Sugarloaf Mountain, An Appalachian Journey. A recognized leader in sacred music, Amanda has performed in venues in Italy, China, Mongolia, and Spain. Amanda is on the faculty at Cleveland State University and is the community arts liaison for the Cultural Arts Center at Disciples Church. www.amandapowell.info
Rebecca Reed
Cellist and gambist Rebecca Landell Reed’s “luminous” (Cleveland.com) and “notable” (The New York Times) sound elicits a range of expression “from classically evocative to Hitchcock horrifying” (Washingtonian). Her solo appearances include performances with Apollo’s Fire, Atlanta Baroque Orchestra, Les Delices, Columbus Symphony, and Batzdorfer Hofkapelle. Rebecca pursues a diverse professional career, such as performing and acting in Studio Theatre’s “An Iliad”, working with Debra Nagy on educational video scripts for “Early Music Explorations”, and teaching beginners through professionals at the Baroque Performance Institute. She is currently on faculty at Oberlin Conservatory, where she teaches baroque cello and viola da gamba.
Emma-Lisa Roux
Emma-Lisa Roux discovered the Renaissance lute at the age of six with her first teacher, Claire Antonini, who also introduced her to singing. Her growing passion for Renaissance music led her to study the lute at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, where she completed her Bachelor's degree with Hopkinson Smith in 2018, her Master's degree with Peter Croton in early 2021, and her Master of Pedagogy in June 2022. She focuses on repertoire from the 15th to the 17th centuries, performing in Europe with ensembles such as Ensemble Phoenix Munich, Phaedrus, Per-Sonat, and the Casulana Lute Consort, as a lute player or a singing lutenist. Emma-Lisa also regularly performs alone on stage with her program “Singing to the lute” (Italian madrigals and French songs of the 16th century).
Gaia Saetermoe-Howard
Gaia Saetermoe-Howard is a New York City-based oboist, recorder player, and educator, who enjoys an active career as a freelance orchestral musician, chamber artist, and soloist creating innovative concerts focused on global perspectives of historical music. Also an avid scholar, she continues to focus on music history and its intersections with archaeology, and holds a degree in Archaeology from the University of Rochester and music degrees from the Juilliard School and Eastman School of Music. Gaia also teaches private oboe lessons and loves sharing the joy of music with her students.
Yael Senamaud
French-born violist Yael Senamaud was a member of the Chamber Orchestra of Paris and Palau De Les Artes Reina Sofia Opera in Valencia, Spain, and has performed with the Orchestra of Paris and the National Opera. An avid chamber musician, she was a founding member of the Alizes Quartet and the Trio Interlude (flute, viola, and harp). An abiding interest in different styles of music led Yael to perform contemporary music with the Ensemble Intercontemporain under the baton of Pierre Boulez. She is a graduate of the Conservatoire National de Paris and Peabody Institute, where her teachers included Bruno Pasquier and Paul Coletti. As a Baroque player, Yael has performed in various ensembles including Bourbon Baroque, Indianapolis Baroque, and Apollo’s Fire.
Joe Schlesinger
Joe Schlesinger, countertenor, played trumpet in the Augustana College Symphony, completing a Bachelor of Arts in Finance and Asian Studies. After receiving his Masters in Music from DePaul University, Mr. Schlesinger received a Netherlands America-Fulbright Fellowship to study Baroque Music at the Dutch Royal Conservatory. Mr. Schlesinger’s Baroque repertoire includes J.S. Bach’s Magnificat, Weihnachts Oratorium, B-minor Mass, St. Matthew Passion, St. John Passion, and G.F. Handel’s Messiah, Saul and Israel in Egypt. On the operatic stage Mr. Schlesinger sang roles ranging from Boris Godunov by Mussorgsky to Judith Weir’s A Night at the Chinese Opera. In European contemporary music Mr. Schlesinger debuted roles in various Dutch operas and sang El Niño by John Adams. Upon returning to the United States, Mr. Schlesinger is delighted to have joined Apollo’s Fire, Quire Cleveland, Chicago’s Music of the Baroque, Seattle Pro Musica, Madison Bach Musicians and the Baldwin Wallace Bach Festival.
Shelby Yamin
Violinist Shelby Yamin brings signature vivacity to performances across the globe, from the historic state rooms of George Washington's Mount Vernon to the storied chapel at Versailles. Equally adept on modern and baroque violin, Shelby has appeared as a soloist with Philharmonia Baroque Chamber Players, the San Francisco Academy Orchestra, Tafelmusik Winter Institute, and as guest concertmaster of the 2019 Berwick Academy of the Oregon Bach Festival. Also an active chamber musician, she regularly collaborates with a wide range of New York based ensembles and Cleveland's Les Délices. Shelby earned degrees from the Manhattan School of Music, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and The Juilliard School, where she won the Historical Performance Concerto Competition. In addition to her active performance and teaching career, Shelby is the Associate Producer of SalonEra. She currently resides in New York City.