Josephine van Lier and Lucas Harris
Fri, Sep 20
|Edmonton
Come and enjoy Baroque Cello/Viola da Gamba and Lute/baroque guitar duets
Time & Location
Sep 20, 2024, 7:30 PM – 10:00 PM
Edmonton, 8403 104 St NW, Edmonton, AB T6E 4G1, Canada
Guests
About the event
Lucas Harris leads a busy freelancer’s life as a lutenist, conductor, continuo player, teacher, lecturer, coach, researcher, and audio/video editor. His collection of nearly twenty plucked-string instruments includes various Renaissance & Baroque lutes/guitars as well as a theorbo, cittern, bandora, an 1831 Guadagnini guitar, and a 7-string electric guitar with a Floyd-Rose tremolo bar. He discovered the lute during his undergraduate studies at Pomona College, where he graduated summa cum laude. He then studied early music at the Civica scuola di musica di Milano and at the Hochschule für Künste Bremen before beginning his freelancing career in New York City. For the past two decades he bases his activities in Toronto, where he serves as the regular lutenist for Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra. He is a founding member of the Toronto Continuo Collective, the Vesuvius Ensemble (dedicated to Southern Italian folk music), as well as the Lute Legends Collective (an association of specialists in diverse ancient plucked-string traditions). Lucas plays with many ensembles in Canada and the USA and has worked in recent years with the Helicon Foundation, the Smithsonian Chamber Players, The Newberry Consort, Les Délices, and Jordi Savall / Le Concert des Nations, and Early Music Vancouver. He teaches at the Tafelmusik Summer and Winter Baroque Institutes, Oberlin Conservatory’s Baroque Performance Institute, and the Canadian Renaissance Music Summer School. Also a choral conductor, Lucas has been the Artistic Director of the Toronto Chamber Choir since 2014 and has developed and conducted nearly thirty themed concert programs for the TCC. He has also been a guest director for the Pacific Baroque Orchestra, the Ohio State University Opera Program, Les voix baroques, Atalante, and the Toronto Consort. Lucas’s longstanding interest in women composers has resulted in many projects including the reconstruction of 12 solo-voice motets by Chiara Margarita Cozzolani (the edition is now available for free download at the Web Library for Seventeenth-Century Music).
Josephine van Lier is a Dutch cellist and viola da gambist who has called Edmonton, Alberta, Canada her home since 1995. Born with an insatiable passion for music and a profound dedication to historically informed performance practice, Josephine has built a remarkable career that encompasses both the “traditional” classical and early worlds of music. A versatile musician and educator, Josephine’s repertoire is as diverse as her instrument collection. She is equally comfortable performing on historic instruments like the baroque cello, a 5-string violoncello piccolo, a 7-string bass viola da gamba, a violone, or a tenor or treble gamba, as she is on their modern counterparts. Her collection spans over 400 years of instrument design, construction, and materials. This extraordinary range of instruments and bows allows her to explore a vast array of musical repertoire, pushing the boundaries of music performance.
Josephine’s profound musicality and dedication to historical accuracy have earned her international acclaim. One notable achievement is her 4-disc recording of the Bach cello suites, which has received accolades in leading publications worldwide. Reviews in Strad Magazine, Oxford Early Music, and a prestigious “Editor’s Choice” five-star rating from London’s “Early Music Today” serve as a testament to her exceptional artistry and commitment to the authenticity of the music.