Dear Friends,

As 2018 comes to a close, Bloomington Early Music celebrates a season of unprecedented growth, thanks to the amazing creativity of many artists, the multiple partnerships we’ve developed, and the dedicated people who support our work.

We look toward exciting new opportunities for 2019 and invite you to support our mission generously.

​It’s inspiring to know that this year’s Bloomington Early Music Festival was enjoyed by a dramatically expanded audience! Through innovative live-streaming on Facebook and IUMusicLive, more than 25,000 early music fans across the US and around the world were able to watch, in addition to the approximately 4,000 audience members at the concerts. Our new partnership with Early Music America also led to multiple high-profile articles in their quarterly magazine, as well as mentions in blogs and social media posts. This substantially aided our mission to support and showcase the extraordinary talent of emerging artists.

Exciting plans are underway for the 2019 Bloomington Early Music Festival. Besides continuation of our work with partners Early Music America and the IU Historical Performance Institute, we anticipate welcoming three long-standing national organizations - the Lute Society, the Viola da Gamba Society, and the American Recorder Society. Running from May 17-25, BLEMF ’19 promises to be a truly impressive week for early music enthusiasts in Bloomington, the region, and around the globe.

In addition to the festival, we’ve been enjoying a busy 2018-19 season through sponsorship of several projects: Las Aves performed in the IU Salon Latino Chamber series; Alchymy Viols presented two concerts at Trinity Episcopal Church (one with the IndyBaroque Chamber Players); we presented two concerts at the Courthouse; and the popular Bloomington Bach Cantata Project is in the middle of its ninth annual series at St. Thomas Lutheran Church. Finally, our education programming will soon provide performance and teaching residencies at several local elementary schools, thanks in part to a grant from the Bloomington Arts Commission. Let us know if you’d like more information about these programs.

Our efforts to support musicians and present early music to the Bloomington community would not be possible without the support of our donors. We invite you to consider making a generous tax-deductible donation to Bloomington Early Music as you plan your end-of-year giving.

  Thank you for your support of Bloomington Early Music!

Board Members: Alain Barker (President), Adam Dillon (Secretary), Anthony Lanman (Treasurer), Paulina Francisco (Manager), Erica Rubis (Education), Mollie Abels, Aaron Cain, Alison Calhoun, Micah Fleming, Sally Gaskill, Dana Marsh, Reynaldo Patiño, Stanley Ritchie, and Shelley Taylor.

By Peter Jacobi H-T Columnist

When all of the music was over and all my reviews of BLEMF concerts had run in The Herald-Times, I sat down to ponder what I had written.

It was different when, earlier in the process of creation, I sat at the computer and typed out the copy, testing the words with my ears to determine if, in formation, they made sense. It was different when, on completion of the copy, I edited it carefully as I could before sending it for publication. It is normally different when, after covering a single event, I scan the newspaper to see if the review is there and do a read-through, hoping not to find any error that might have slipped through. But post- BLEMF, I had words about a bunch of events, a lot of words, an awful lot.

Of the Bloomington Early Music Festival’s host of concerts, performed over a period of 10 days, most of them clustered during two extended weekends, I managed to attend 10. Sorry to have missed the others, but that was the best I could physically and mentally do.

Because the programs often came in clusters (two or three a day), I determined to write them up in the same manner, in clusters. My aim had been to keep down the length, and I did hold down the amount of space given to each event, striving to include, though often briefly, everything I considered a must.

Well, here I was a few days later, looking through those reviews. My coverage, on reflection, was appropriate; I didn’t shortchange content or performances. I dare to say my writing was decent enough, particularly for copy written in a hurry. But looking at the whole, I concluded that, for most readers, the coverage might seem cluttered. There are so many names of musicians and composers. There are so many titles. There are hasty evaluations etched in, one after another after another.
As festival planner or participant, I’d probably be happy enough with the shape of coverage. Fans of early music who attended, I decided, might want to check personal views against a reviewer’s and read. Fans who didn’t might want to find out what happened and read. The folks in charge would study what I said and appreciate the inches upon inches given to their hard work. Bloomington historians might be grateful for having this record as part of a city scrapbook.

Much of the H-T’s readership, though, would stare at a review’s headline, see the length of the copy beneath, and move on, no different than I perusing the sports pages, satisfied with just the scores. As writer, I might read a sportswriter’s story to study the craft. But I’d have little enthusiasm for a rundown of happenings from inning to inning or period to period. Still, those stories also need to be written. A newspaper serves many masters.

But as I said, I sat there and came to realize that I hadn’t encapsulated my thoughts about this Bloomington Early Music Festival of 2018, the 25th since the celebration came to be and the most extensive in length and substance since changes in leadership, reductions in public enthusiasm, and heavyweight financial problems almost killed it a few years back.

This year’s was a youthful BLEMF, beefed by the inclusion of two young artists programs furnished by Early Music America, a national institution that exists to promote the growth of early music in performance practice and scholarship. The presence of those budding musicians, along with ensembles from important music programs around the nation, helped give the festival a welcome vitality.

Not a single concert I attended was mediocre or of just standard fare. Quality throughout was high, often higher than high. The musicians and their leaders expected only the best from themselves. Pride of accomplishment and joy for attending the festival as working artists could be read into action and spirit. To these visitors, add the presence of IU students and alums and longtime friends, prepared to do battle for the cause. Result: more than 130 musicians contributed to the presentations. The Early Music/Historical Performance field apparently is healthy. BLEMF 2018 was its jubilant reflection.

From the Bloomington end of things, Bloomington Early Music, a combine of locally-based individuals important in and for early music, and Indiana University Jacobs School of Music’s Historical Performance Institute were keys in bringing together all the elements of BLEMF 2018, which took important and measurable steps forward from the leaner time.
Alain Barker, executive director of BLEMF in its brightest years, presides over Bloomington Early Music. Dana Marsh serves as chair of the Jacobs School’s Early Music Department and director of its Historical Performance Institute. It is Marsh who consolidated the ties with Early Music America.

How binding those ties will remain, says Marsh, is hard to tell right now, “but it would not be an exaggeration to say that EMA was ecstatic about what our collaboration had to offer at this point in its development, both in terms of future vision and by virtue of what our collaborative model could have to offer a variety of festival situations elsewhere….Everyone benefited equally from this venture. Bloomington gave EMA a far better forum in which to project its interest nationally than has to date been the case in either Boston or Berkley,” sites of the nation’s most prestigious early music festivals, “and at a fraction of the cost. This is especially relevant to the student groups that travelled long distances to be here, who invested heavily their time and energy. I feel we made it very much worth their while.”

Marsh also addressed the addition of streaming opportunities this year: “These provided audiences far away from Bloomington the opportunity to attend events ‘virtually.’” One of BLEMF’s “fathers,” the eminent violinist Stanley Ritchie, was in Australia during the festival but reportedly was able to watch all of the live-streamed events from there.

Barker says the season served as “a break-through moment.” Since its inception, he adds, “The festival has always been a set of partnerships – between students and faculty at IU, between community organizations, with alumni and colleagues in the profession, sometimes with regional and national ensembles, and there’s much to celebrate and admire these past 24 years. However, on a structural level, the organization wasn’t always sure-footed. This year feels different because of the alignment of interests among the partners….I feel more confident than ever that BLEMF can sustain itself.

​“It’s too early,” Barker continues, “to truly know what the significance of this year may mean. My sense, though, is that we can now build towards even greater collaborations, perhaps in partnership with major ensembles and artists, as they develop their passion projects. Bloomington’s ‘special sauce’ for artists who visit is the breathtaking resources we have at our disposal on campus and in this beautiful town. ... We’ll spend the next few months digesting and processing. We’ll plan for next year and beyond and perhaps finally get to the point where a five-year plan is a realistic proposition.”

In other words, right now, the outlook is sunny.

By Peter Jacobi H-T Reviewer | pjacobi@heraldt.com
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For all of its 25 years, thriving ones or lean, the Bloomington Early Music Festival, or BLEMF as we more fondly call it, has been heavily peopled by the young. Those who pushed for such a festival back in 1994 were young.

They were students in what was then called Indiana University’s Early Music Institute, now the Historical Performance Institute. Waiting to take the stage were talents in abundance, and when the festival became reality, they stepped forward. What’s more: loyal alums, many of them in the developing portion of their careers, seemed equally inclined to step in for moments in the festival spotlight; they did so, coming from nearby and far away.

More mature talents were hired to round out the roster, but the look and feel of BLEMF was always budding and buoyant. And who could mind that when the results were, most of the time, so positive?

Well, this current 25th BLEMF, striving to make a strong impression of come-back after several leaner years designed for rebuilding, features an even more dominant footprint of youth. That’s because those who put the festival together — the IU Jacobs School of Music, its Historical Performance Institute, and Bloomington Early Music (dominanant figures in the field combined to preserve BLEMF) — got themselves a new partner.

Early Music America, a national organization with the aim of promoting the performance and study of early music, signed up to bring its Young Performers Festival and Emerging Artists Showcase to Bloomington as part of BLEMF 2018. So, a number of concerts have been devoted to highlighting young talents nationwide — individuals and ensembles — to enlarge the presence of blossoming talent.

Two ensembles performed in consecutive events at First Presbyterian Church Thursday afternoon: The IU-formed and developed Tarara and the Oberlin Baroque. Both declared that, indeed, there is a wealth of talent coming along to give validity and glamor to an endeavor that, through the use of period instruments and performance practices, seeks to more closely tie music’s past to the present and, in reverse, the present to its past. We are shown how music from long ago must have sounded when played in historic style on instruments of the time. In reverse, we can learn what music of more recent eras and even today might sound like when voiced by those old instruments (results can surprise!).

Tarara — an ensemble of 11, some who sing, some who play period instruments, some who do both — focused on late 15th to early 17th century vocal music from Spain and the New World. The repertoire included both sacred and secular pieces: a gorgeous “Ave Maria,” gentle reflections on nature, sharper reactions to people encountered, and humorous tales taken from the imagination and real life.

The five Tarara members who sang — sopranos Paulina Francisco and Lucy Wortham, tenor Gregorio Taniguchi, and basses Danur Kvilhaug and Jonathan Wasserman — made one believe the concert was then, not now, so keen seemed their sense of period. The two basses brought along their guitar and lute expertise. From the remaining musicians (Reynaldo Patino, Adam Dillon, Stephen Nosko, Charles Wines, Sarah Lodico Wines, and Beth Garfinkel) came the music’s other instrumental requirements, exotic exhalations from violin, recorder, sackbut, bagpipes, viola da gamba, percussion, and organ. Dillon and Wasserman directed the ensemble, with faculty advice from Dana Marsh, one of BLEMF 2018’s architects.

Oberlin Baroque, a group of 10 directed by Michael Lynn, proved an extremely gifted set of musicians focused on instrumental music. To prove a point made earlier, that new music played on old instruments can provide a notable experience, a recorder player from the Ohio contingent, Peter Lim, and guitarist Craig Slagh, performed two pieces by Astor Piazzolla, “Café 1930” and “Bordel 1900.” The results were quite wonderful: sensuous in the café visit and deliciously playful for the bawdier place: Lim made of his recorder a flirtatious coloratura; Slagh not only strummed his guitar but struck it with fervor. The music was renewed via the old.

​As for bringing the past into the present: that was much in evidence, as:

• Lim and fellow recorder artists Jonathan Seamon and Kelsey Burnham, along with Matt Bickett on chamber organ and Leonardo Marques Ferreira Lima on viola da gamba, warbled and splashed through Henry Purcell’s “Three Parts on a Ground.”
• Violist da gamba Lima joined two fellow violists, Ruby Brallier and Chris Labman, in stunning unity zipped through Marin Marais’ “Pieces pour trios violes, Livre IV.”
• Organist Bickett masterfully negotiated Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in G Major, BWV 541.
• Violist Labman, in concert with cellist Jessica Korotkin and harpsichordist Abe Ross, fervently and also with commendable finesse added Jean Baptiste Barriere’s “Sonate pour le Violoncelle, Avec la Basse Continue, Livre 3, No. 4” to the ensemble’s afternoon program.
• And, Baroque flutist Kelsey Burnham joined violist Brallier, cellist Korotkin, and harpsichordist Rose for a nifty reading of Georg Philipp Telemann’s Concerto in B Minor, TWV 43:h3.

By Peter Jacobi - Bloomington Herald Times

A pair of programs on Sunday brought the Bloomington Early Music Festival to an end, and successfully so. Beefed by the inclusion of young artists sponsored by Early Music America, the national organization committed to the furthering of early music scholarship and performance practices, BLEMF — over a 10-day period — managed to present a treasury of concerts.

On Sunday afternoon in Trinity Episcopal Church, Les Ordinaires, an ensemble devoted to use of 17th- and 18th-century instruments (copies thereof), continued a series of festival programs fixed on French repertoire here, more specifically, on “Birth of the Flute: Songs with and without Words.”

That meant a spotlight on the flutist in the group, Leela Breithaupt, a virtuoso on the baroque instrument and Les Ordinaires’ director. For one span of about 20 minutes, she tooted and tweeted and released long and longing tones through Michel Pignolet de Monteclair’s “Premier Concert pour la flute traversiere,” a series of 13 short pieces: airs, gigues, minuets, rondeaus, and such. She never faltered; her lips and fingers conquered a gargantuan exercise, romping and floating and coursing through very challenging music.

Breithaupt continued to be tonally prominent during Monteclair’s “Premier Suite from Brunetes ancienes et modernes,” an eight-piece collection topped by the expressive soprano voice of Minnesota-based Carrie Henneman Shaw, tasked with anguishing through tales of misbegotten love. Shaw added Monteclair’s take on the Ariadne and Bacchus misadventures in mythology, another test of endurance for her voice. She endured without problem.

Through much of the afternoon concert, the ensemble’s other musicians — violinist Allison Nyquist, violist da gamba Erica Rubis, and harpsichordist Jory Vinikour – were asked to enrich the performance and surely did. More Monteclair and an air by Jacques Hotteterre filled out the program.

In the evening

The evening festival finale in Auer Hall featured the Festival Orchestra and a series of outstanding soloists in German and Italian music of the baroque. It was performed in memory of the late Victor Harnack, a Bloomingtonian-in-retirement who gave immeasurable assistance to BLEMF in times of need. Friend Victor would have gloried in Sunday’s music.

A star in the early music firmament, the wonderful Ingrid Matthews, an alumna of IU’s Jacobs School and early participant in BLEMF events, returned from her now Seattle-based life to both direct the orchestra and add a solo highlight. That highlight was Antonio Vivaldi’s Concerto Number 2 in G Minor, “Summer,” one of the composer’s “of course it’s Vivaldi” gallops, delightful to listen to and a humdinger to play. My, how Matthews played it!

More Vivaldi, the Concerto in B Minor, called upon cellist Kevin Flynn and a quartet of violinists from the orchestra (Maria Romero, Reynaldo Patino, Micah Fleming and Anna Maberry) to move front and center for their chance to vanquish the Vivaldi tests. They, too, distinguished themselves.

George Frideric Handel was represented by his Suite in G Major and a scene from the opera “Alcina.” The suite, in five movements either ornamented or stately, put the splendid 16-member orchestra to work and, as a concert opener, set the high quality tone for all that followed. The “Alcina” excerpt, an interplay involving Alcina (Paula Francisco), Ruggiero (Kia Marie Frank, and Bradamante (Elijah McCormack), as sung, correctly captured the flavor of bantering.

Soprano McCormack returned to the stage, took an almost motionless position, assumed an attitude of accepted sorrow, and let his voice create tragedy, that of Orfeo grieving the loss of his beloved Eurydice in Luigi Rossi’s early 17th-century version of the tale: Suicide is contemplated as a means for reunion with her in death. McCormack’s interpretation, never overwrought, was stunning. This young soprano is turning out to be a very special artist.

Jory Vinikour, on harpsichord, took on Johann Sebastian Bach’s Concerto Number 1 in D Minor, BWV 1052. In a brilliant performance, he produced lyric sorrow during the concerto’s middle movement, an Adagio, but inconceivably furious, fast, and florid masses of notes in the surrounding Allegros. Breathtaking.
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Sunday’s program ended with the Concerto Grosso in D Major by Arcangelo Corelli, most of its pages — like Vivaldi’s — filled with quicksilver, pump-and-saw passages. With violinist Matthews at the helm, the orchestra grasped hold of the music’s technical dares and vanquished them. We had good music right to the end.

By Peter Jacobi | H-T Reviewer | pjacobi@heraldt.com May 27, 2018
Early Music America, visiting partner in the programming offered by the Bloomington Early Music Festival, continued to have a significant impact on what audiences saw and heard on Friday.

​Pledged to promote the study of and the performance opportunities in early music, often now called historical performance, EMA made BLEMF its 2018 site of preference: the event at which to stage its annual Young Performers Festival and Emerging Artists Showcase.

In the afternoon, at Trinity Episcopal Church, another collegiate ensemble was featured, on this occasion the Peabody Conservatory’s B’More Bach Ensemble. In the evening, for the showcase, the headliners were a recorder-viola da gamba duo called Rumore Terribile, harpsichordist Melisande McNabney and a Juilliard School-originated ensemble, Voyage Sonique.

All proved there’s an amazing array of talent around devoted to early music; what one heard was impressive. However, in the evening, each also proved to be a rule breaker. Reportedly, the musicians were told to hold their portion of that concert to 20 minutes. Instead, each portion exceeded 40. In sum, and without official breaks, that was more than a number of audience members could take. There were departures, a shame for those who performed late.
Still, the musical values exhibited on Friday could not be doubted.

The afternoon

Peabody’s B’More Bach Ensemble consists of seven musicians, all graduate students at the institute. They spent the afternoon focused on Bach, of course, but also his important contemporary, Georg Philipp Telemann.

The Telemann pieces, Paris Quartet No. 2 in A Minor and Trietto No. 1 in G Major, were happy, gentle items, typical of the composer’s chamber music. Sets of four played them with clarity and a fine sense of line. The flute was each work’s featured instrument, one for the Paris Quartet, two for the Trietto. Sara Lynn tackled both with remarkable agility and lungs capable of the long haul. JT Mitchell served as her partner in the Trietto and totally held his own.

The four Bach selections included three vocal, which cast soprano Katelyn Aungst and baritone William Marshall into starring roles. From BWV 21 “Ich hatte viel Bekummernis” (“I Had Much Affliction”), the two joined for a duet expressing dependency on Jesus (“Come, my Jesus, and restore and delight with your glance”). Their voices vividly took on the emotion. From BWV 51 “Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen” (“Exult in God in Every Land”), soprano Aungst sang “Highest, renew your goodness every morning from now on.” Again, her voice captured the pleading, tearful nature of the aria’s message. The two then combined to unleash the fear and trembling addressed in “Crack open, heaven; tremble, world. Descend into my lament,” from the “St. John Passion.”

Flutist Lynn was joined by violinist Stephanie Zimmerman, cellist Matt Gabriel and harpsichordist Paula Maust for a carefully balanced and lyrically toned reading of Bach’s Trio Sonata in G Major, BWV 1038.

The evening

“Rumore Terribile,” a duo of two years standing, brings together the gifts of Martin Bernstein on recorders and Salome Gasselin on viola da gamba. Bernstein adds acting occasionally to his bag of tricks. It looked as if he can on Friday, but speaking without microphone and often diminishing his interpretation to near whispers, much of what he uttered was lost to this listener. It’s a complaint I frequently share after listening to musicians (and others) talk from the Auer stage.
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The two performed a program of French and British music, 17th- and early 18th-century works by Louis and Francois Couperin, Jean-Marie Leclair, Marin Marais, Humphrey Salter, and Matthew Locke. The Italian composer and lutenist Andrea Falconieri snuck into the list with a soft, soothing melody of his. Bernstein and Gasselin make for a compelling duo. Their technical mastery of the instruments is first rate; they work in comfortable unison, and they seem to believe strongly in the music they play.

Harpsichordist Melisande McNabney delivered an all-French program of exquisite delicacy and elegance, some of it consisting of works she has transcribed. One heard music of Jean-Henri d’Anglebert, Jean-Philippe Rameau, Jean-Baptiste Lully and Antoine Forqueray. Her keyboard technique is formidable. Her taste is appropriately refined. Her sense of period is assured. Her conception of the music is on point. She well should be an artist on the rise.
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Leclair, Francois Couperin and Marin Marais — more French fare — provided the substance for Voyage Sonique’s concert-closing segment. This group — violinists Augusta McKay Lodge and Jeffrey Girton, cellist Keiran Campbell and harpsichordist Robert Warner — played mostly as full ensemble. Its usual theorbo player had to miss the festival and was replaced by the eminent locally based Dusan Balarin, who fit right in.

In the ensemble’s playing, one could hear strong interpretive inclinations: a more formal yet intimate Sunday concert feel for Leclair’s Trio Sonata No. 1 in D Minor; a dreamy nature in Couperin’s “Le Parnasse ou L’apothetique de Corelli”; a haunting quality in Marais’ Chaconne from “Semele” and subtleties of presentation in Couperin’s Les Concerts Royaux No. 4. All were performed superbly; the musicians really appeared to belong.