Second Row
Christopher LeCluyse
Jennifer Paulino
Rob Diggins
Julie Jeffrey
Daniel Hutchings
Carla Moore

Third Row
Katherine Heater
Martin Hummel
Laura Heimes
Warren Stewart
Louise Carslake
Peter Becker

Fourth Row
David Morris
Anthony Martin
Nigel North
John Dornenburg
Aaron Sheehan
Jillon Stoppels Dupree

Fifth Row
Andrew Rader
David Wilson
Hugh Davies
Stephen Escher
Herbert Myers
John Lenti

Background photo by Nika Korniyenko

After teaching music in Australia for two years, Hugh moved to California in 1986. He now sings, mostly in the San Francisco area, both as a soloist and as a member of several professional ensembles, and has appeared with groups such as Theatre of Voices, American Bach Soloists, California Bach Society, Magnificat, Albany Consort, San Francisco Bach Choir, Santa Rosa Symphony, Sonoma County Bach Choir and Symphony Silicon Valley. He has also appeared with Boston-based Cut Circle and, in Southern California, with Pacific Chorale and Musica Angelica.

Hugh is also President of ACFEA Tour Consultants, an organization that arranges international tours for amateur performing arts ensembles, and serves on the board of Chorus America and as President of American Bach Soloists.

Background photo by Ya-Hsuan Huang

In addition to Magnificat, Rob performs with Omnia Musica, Les Conversations Galante, the Portland Baroque Orchestra, Music from Green Mountain, and his gypsy-jazz band, The Dizzy Vipers. Rob studies South Indian Classical Music with Shree Vidya Chandramouli and yoga with Swami Veda Bharati and other senior students of H. H. Swami Rama and teaches yoga and meditation in the Himalayan Yoga Tradition. He enjoys teaching his many talented string students in the Eastern European Classical tradition and attending to various sustainable gardening and community projects in Northern California.

Rob is currently piecing together a brand new ensemble, Omnia Musica, which will debut with a South Asian tour in 2011. Highlights of the tour will include performances for the King and Queens of Bhutan, the Monk body and other select locations in Nepal, Thailand and the Indian sub-continent.

Visit Rob’s Website

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John has made solo recordings of gamba music by J.S. Bach, C.P.E. Bach, Marais, Telemann, Abel, Hume, Simpson, Sainte-Colombe, Kühnel, and Handel, and can be heard on the Centaur, Meridian, Koch, Dorian, Musica Omnia, Music and Arts, Musical Heritage Society, and other recording labels. He has also made many concert recordings for radio and television in both Europe and the U.S.A., including the BBC, NPR’s Performance Today, and CBS television’s Sunday Morning program. John has been Music Director for performances of Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610 and Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas (both for the Renaissance and Baroque Society of Pittsburgh), and in 2005 he conducted a fully staged production of Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea at California State University in Sacramento.

In the San Francisco Bay Area John can be heard with his chamber groups Music’s Re-creation and the Sex Chordæ Consort of Viols as well as Magnificat, Jubilate Orchestra, American Bach Soloists, and Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra. Over the years he has worked with a long list of distinguished artists including Andrew Parrott, Jaap Schroeder, Stanley Ritchie, Marion Verbruggen, Julianne Baird, Judith Nelson, Paul Hillier, Andrew Lawrence King, Helmuth Rilling, Bruno Weil, Kent Nagano, Jeffrey Thomas, Nicholas McGegan, Warren Stewart, Malcolm Proud, Ensemble Rebel, and Chatham Baroque. As a chamber musician he performs on all sizes of the viola da gamba family, including the G and D violones.

John is the first American to be awarded the Soloist’s Diploma for viola da gamba from the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, Holland, where his teacher was Wieland Kuijken. Before that, he studied baroque performance practice with Nikolaus Harnoncourt at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria.  He earned his Bachelor’s degree in music at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where he first became interested in the performance of early music while collaborating with fellow students Robert Eisenstein and Scot Reiss. He has been the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, and has been selected for the Touring Artist Roster of the California Arts Council. Publications include three collections of 17th-century viol consort music by John Hingeston for PRB Productions, as well as reviews and articles in the Journal of Seventeenth Century Music and Early Music America.

John has taught music history at Carnegie-Mellon University, and has served as Affiliate Assistant Professor and Artist-in-Residence at the University of Washington. He is a frequent faculty member at workshops such as the National Conclave of the Viola da Gamba Society of America, Viols West, Amherst Early Music, Aston Magna, and the San Francisco Early Music Society summer workshops at Dominican University. He is currently Lecturer in Viola da gamba at Stanford University, and Lecturer in music history and literature at California State University, Sacramento.

Background photo by Warren Stewart

Jillon has been a featured artist at the York Early Music Festival (England), the Boston Early Music Festival, the Berkeley Early Music Festival, the National Music Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Santa Barbara Art Museum, and numerous universities and colleges. Her world premiere recording of Philip Glass’s Concerto for Harpsichord and Chamber Orchestra, released in 2006 on the Orange Mountain Music label, has been described as “superb” by the New York Times.

Jillon has collaborated with some of today’s foremost musicians and ensembles, including recorder virtuoso Marion Verbruggen, violinists Stanley Ritchie and Jaap Schröder, sopranos Ellen Hargis and Julianne Baird, the ensembles Musica Pacifica and The Newberry Consort, dancer Anna Mansbridge, the Seattle Symphony (with whom she has recorded), and the Seattle Baroque Orchestra.

Background photo by Warren Stewart

background photo by Nika Korniyenko

Paul’s discography includes over one hundred recordings ranging from Perotin to Weber. Amongst his best-known recordings are two CDs of Handel’s Messiah and the video recording of that work filmed in Westminster Abbey and conducted by Christopher Hogwood. He also appeared in the television series Music in Time hosted by James Galway. More recent recordings include Proverb by Steve Reich for Nonesuch andFragments, Hoquetus, The Age of Cathedrals and Monastic Song for Harmonia Mundi (USA).

Paul has a remarkably varied repertoire: he has toured Bach Passions with the London Bach Orchestra and with the Amsterdam Chamber Orchestra under Charles de Wolff in Holland, sung Handel’s L’Allegro ed Pensierowith Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra under Nicolas McGegan, performed concerts of medieval and renaissance music at summer festivals in Barcelona, Ferrara and Nantes and in the Vancouver Early Music Festival, and toured in the United States with songs by Beethoven and Schubert accompanied by fortepiano with Andrew Appel and Ensemble Four Nations, as well as performing early and contemporary music by Cage, Palestrina and Arvo Pärt with Theatre of Voices at the Opéra de Paris, the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. and in New York, Leipzig, Berlin, Rome, Milan and London.

A Professor of Music on the Voice and Early Music Institute faculties in the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, Paul has also been a Visiting Lecturer at Washington University, St. Louis, and taught master-classes for Musique Sacrée à Notre-Dame de Paris. He holds the CMVT (Certified McClosky Voice Technician) designation from the Boston-based McClosky Institute of Voice of which he is a past President. Paul Elliott is a member of the National Association of Teachers of Singing and is a consultant for the Chimay International Baroque Singing Competition. He is an Honorary Fellow (Hon FASC) of the London-based Academy of St. Cecilia.

Mr. Elliott trains soloists and small chamber groups with special emphasis on appropriate performance styles and techniques in all periods of music. He is married to the viola da gamba player Wendy Gillespie. They divide their time between performing and teaching work in the United States and relaxation and European performances from their base in Nice, France.

background photo by Nika Korniyenko

Katherine received her B.A. in music from UC Berkeley and her M.M. in historical performance from Oberlin Conservatory. Thanks to fellowships from her alma mater and Philanthropic Ventures Foundation, Katherine studied early keyboards at the Sweelinck Conservatorium in Amsterdam.

background photo by Nika Korniyenko

Praised for her “sparkle and humor, radiance and magnetism” and hailed for “a voice equally velvety up and down the registers”, soprano Laura Heimes is widely regarded as an artist of great versatility, with repertoire ranging from the Renaissance to the 21st century. She has collaborated with many of the leading figures in early music, including Andrew Lawrence King, Julianne Baird, Tempeste di Mare, The King’s Noyse, Paul O’Dette, Chatham Baroque, Apollo’s Fire, The New York Collegium, The Publick Musick, Brandywine Baroque, Trinity Consort, and Piffaro – The Renaissance Band, a group with whom she has toured the United States. She has been heard at the Boston, Connecticut and Indianapolis Early Music Festivals, at the Oregon and Philadelphia Bach Festivals under the baton of Helmuth Rilling, at the Carmel Bach Festival under Bruno Weil, and in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, Brazil in concerts of Bach and Handel. With the Philadelphia Orchestra she appeared as Mrs. Nordstrom in Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music. December 2003 marked her Carnegie Hall debut in Handel’s Messiah with the Masterwork Chorus.

Highlights of the 2010-11 season will include Telemann’s Ino with Tempesta di Mare (Philadelphia, PA), Venetian music with ARTEK (Drew University, Princeton, NYC), Bach’s St. Matthew Passion (Philadelphia, PA), Handel’sGloria with Voices of Music (Berkeley, Palo Alto and San Francisco, CA), Vivalidi’s Nulla Pax in Mundo Sincera, Scarlatti’s Venere, Amore e Ragione, and a program of Elizabeth Jacquet de la Guerre cantatas with Brandywine Baroque (Exton, PA, Rehoboth and Greenville, DE). She will appear in an all Bach program with Voices of Music on the Renaissance and Baroque Society Series (Pittsburgh, PA). Also in Pittsburgh, Ms. Heimes will sing Monteverdi with Chatham Baroque – a program in association with the Pittsburgh Symphony. She continues her collaborations with Piffaro – The Renaissance Band and will appear with them twice this season; the first time in a program entitled The Royals’ Baptism & Ballet and the second time for their holiday concerts called Drive the Cold Winter Away!

Repeat engagements with NYS Baroque (Ithaca, Elmira and Syracuse, NY) and Pegasus Early Music will bring Ms. Heimes to upstate NY three times this season. The first program – Death and Devotion – contains music by Bach, Buxtehude and Pachelbel. The second is an all Handel program which will include Terpsicore as well as Handel opera arias. With Pegasus Early Music (Rochester, NY) she will sing a program called An English Treasury– a lute song recital with director Deborah Fox.

Laura’s most recent recordings include On The Just Treatment of Licentious Men (modern art songs by Peter Flint), Cantatas Françoises (music of Jacquet de la Guerre and Clérambault), Handel Duets and Trios; Oh! the Sweet Delights of Love: the songs of Purcell with Brandywine Baroque; The Lass with the Delicate Air: English Songs from the London Pleasure Gardens;The Jane Austen Songbook with Julianne Baird; and Caldara’s Il Giuoco del Quadriglio with Julianne Baird and the Queen’s Chamber Band conducted by Stephen Altop. A recording of the Biblical Cantatas of Elizabeth Jacquet de la Guerre is currently in progress.

A native of Rochester NY, Laura holds her Bachelors degree from SUNY Geneseo and Master of Music degrees in Choral Conducting and Voice Performance from Temple University. Ms. Heimes has recorded for Dorian, Pro Gloria Musicae, Plectra Music, Sonabilis, and Albany and Avian records.

Visit Laura Heimes’ Website