Anna Marsh, bassoonist;
Coming to Grace Church on Lopez Island and St. David’s Episcopal Church in Friday Harbor, the Cascade Early Music Festival presents LOUIS XIV’S BASSOON, which will explore the role of the bassoon at the court of Louis XIV and later during 18th century with baroque bassoonist Anna Marsh, baroque flutist Jeffrey Cohan, baroque oboist Sand Dalton and lutenist John Lenti. The performance will take place Saturday, Jan. 9 at 7 p.m. at Grace Church just north of Lopez Village on Lopez Island, and on Sunday afternoon, Jan. 10 at 2 p.m. at St. David’s Episcopal Church at 780 Park Street in Friday Harbor.
This program, featuring the seldom-heard baroque bassoon, will explore one of the most precious unpublished and little-known musical manuscripts in the Library of Congress. Prepared by André Danican Philidor l’ainé, Music Librarian to Louis XIV, and presented in 1695 to the Duke of Bavaria, Elector Maximilian II Emanuel, it contains 220 works from operas and other works by Louis XIV’s favorite composers such as Lully, De la Lande, Charpentier and Lambert, all transcribed by Philidor for bassoon and one or two additional instruments for the Duke’s private entertainment. Philidor’s own Air pour la Flûte Allemande, which predates any other known solo specifically for the baroque transverse flute, will be heard along with other selections from this remarkable volume along with other works.
About the performers:
Currently in great demand for regular performances in Seattle, New York, Boston, Los Angeles and Canada, bassoonist ANNA MARSH is currently pursuing a doctorate in historical bassoons with Michael McCraw at Indiana University. She has a wide variety of musical interests and performs regularly on modern, baroque and classical bassoon and contrabassoons, shawms, dulcians, saxophone and voice. Anna received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in modern bassoon from the University of Southern California where she studied early music with James Tyler. She has appeared in Germany and the Czech Republic and for the Hollywood Bowl, the Banff Centre for the Arts, the Boston Early Music Festival, Sante Fe Pro Musica, Atlanta Baroque Orchestra, Chicago Chorale, Symphony in the Barn and others. Anna will appear as a guest artist on a forthcoming album on Centaur Records “Basically French.”
Flutist JEFFREY COHAN, a featured soloist with Chamber Music San Juans in November, has performed as soloist in 25 countries, having received international acclaim both as a modern flutist and as one of the foremost specialists on all transverse flutes from the Renaissance through the present. He is the only person to win both the Erwin Bodky Award in Boston, and the highest prize awarded in the Flanders Festival International Concours Musica Antiqua in Brugge, Belgium. First Prize winner of the Olga Koussevitzky Young Artist Awards Competition, he has performed throughout Europe, Australia, New Zealand and the United States, and worldwide for the USIA Arts America Program. He received the highest rating from the Music Panel of the National Endowment for the Arts, and has recorded for NPR in the United States, and for national radio and television in Germany, Switzerland, France, Belgium, Holland, Fiji and the Solomon Islands. Many works have been written for and premiered by him, including four new flute concerti since 2000. He is artistic director of the Capitol Hill Chamber Music Festival in Washington, DC and the Cascade Early Music Festival. He can “play many superstar flutists one might name under the table” according to the New York Times.
Lopez Island resident SAND DALTON began playing the baroque oboe in 1975 after graduating from the California Institute of the Arts, where he studied modern oboe with Allan Vogel. A year later he made his first instrument and began an extensive and on-going study of historical oboes which has taken him to many museums and private collections both in Europe and North America. Concurrently, he has pursued an active career as a performer and teacher. Over the years he has performed and recorded with many ensembles, including the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, Boston Baroque, the Handel and Haydn Society, Magnificat, Portland Baroque Orchestra, Seattle Baroque and the Pacific Baroque Orchestra of Vancouver, B.C. His long experience playing in baroque orchestral and chamber music has provided him with an ideal ‘laboratory’ in which to test and refine his ideas about making good musical instruments. He has been of the faculties of the New England Conservatory, the University of British Columbia and Longy School of Music, as well as taught at the summer workshops for the San Francisco Early Music Society, Vancouver Early Music Program, Amherst Early Music Workshop and the International Baroque Institute at Longy. In 2000 be began directing his own summer workshop for baroque oboes and bassoons on Lopez Island. Described by CBC Radio as “one of the leading baroque oboists in North America whose fine instruments are played around the world.” Sand Dalton is dedicated to making oboes of the highest musical and technical standard.
Lutenist JOHN LENTI has performed repertoire stretching from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries on lute and theorbo throughout the United States, at the Bloomington and Boston Early Music Festivals, the Festival Guldener-Herbst in Sondershausen, Germany, and at the Magnolia Baroque Festival in North Carolina. John is associate director and regularly plays continuo for the Seattle Baroque Orchestra and has performed with the Seattle Opera and the Pittsburgh Opera, besides playing chamber music with groups like Ensemble Amarelli, Stolen Bread, Harmonious Blacksmith and La Monica. His recording credits include The Courtesan’s Arts, with Ellen Hargis on Oxford University Press and On the Amorous Lyre with La Monica. He is also co-founder with soprano Linda Tsatsanis of the ensemble Dulces Exuviae, described by the Seattle Times as the ‘best new concert series of 2007,’ with John’s playing singled out as ‘a joy to behold.’ Following undergraduate guitar study with Gerald Klickstein at the North Carolina School of the Arts, John moved to London to study lute with Jacob Heringman and Elizabeth Kenny, returning to the United States in 2002 to study with Nigel North at Indiana University. Other significant musical help and inspiration have come from Ricardo Cobo, Ronn McFarlane and Patrick O’Brien.
The suggested donation (a free will offering towards expenses) will be $15. Youth 18 and under are free. For further information the public is requested to call (360) 468-3477 on Lopez Island, and (360) 378-5360 in Friday Harbor, or to see www.cemf.org.
• The Cascade Early Music Festival presents regular period instrument performances in Bellingham and Leavenworth and elsewhere around the Northwest with some of the finest period instrument performers from the Northwest and the USA, Canada and Germany since 2004. Flutist Jeffrey Cohan is the festival’s artistic director.
