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Arcadia Players

Celebrating
20 Years of
Historical Performance


Ian Watson, Artistic Director 
Board of Directors and Advisory Board Bios


Sally J. Lemaire Elected President of Arcadia Players Board  - Nov. 6, 2008

The Board of Directors of Arcadia Players is pleased to announce the appointment of Ms. Sally J. Lemaire of South Hadley as president. Sally Lemaire has been a supporter of Arcadia Players for over a decade; her longstanding interest in Baroque and earlier music stretches back to her years of piano study.
 
Lemaire has led several organizations in her professional career and in her volunteer commitments. From 1991 to 2003 she was executive director of the over 30,000-member Alumnae Association of Mount Holyoke College. During eleven of those years she also served as a member, and then President, of The Corporation for Independent Living, an organization committed to building accessible housing for people with disabilities.Prior to coming to the Pioneer Valley,

Lemaire worked in both non-profit and for-profit businesses, specializing in management and career development. Concurrent with her professional responsibilities, she supported arts organizations, especially those providing music, in her communities. In a world where violence and wars are frequent and are part of the structure of our society, she believes that music, other art forms, authentic movement and community building are urgently needed as an antidote.

In addition to her community work, Lemaire writes poetry and draws with pastels. Her other primary interests are in the spiritual and sports realms: she is a supporter and volunteer at Haydenville Congregational Church and a member of The Orchards Golf Club in South Hadley. Sally Lemaire looks forward to working with Ian Watson, Arcadia’s Artistic Director, and with the Arcadia Board, whose diverse talents and backgrounds bear on the performance, funding and promotion of early music in historically-informed performance.




E. Wayne Abercrombie, Advisory Board -- Retired Professor of Music and Choral Director, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.  BM & MM Westminster Choir College, Princeton, NJ.  D. Mus. Indiana University.  Other professional affiliations: President of the American Choral Directors Association, Eastern Division; Massachusetts Music Educators Association and Music Educators National Conference; National Collegiate Choral Organization; Conductors Guild - Past Member of the National Board.



Jeanne Ammon, Board of Directors, is a retired physical therapist. She received B.S. and M.S. degrees from Boston University and taught and practiced physical therapy in the Boston area and in Albany. She settled in the Pioneer Valley fifteen years ago and now lives in Hadley, where she runs a bed and breakfast. Jeanne has participated in numerous early music workshops playing recorder and viola da gamba. She is presently a member of the Board of Directors of the Viola da Gamba Society of America. She serves on the Personnel and Administrative Committees of the Arcadia Players Board.


Anna Polesny Bartoli, Advisory Board
– B.A. Art History; M.S. Psychology; M.F.A.Weaving and Textile Design; consultant, artist and teacher; Director of Anava Designs, Santa Cruz, CA & Northampton, MA; former board president of the Santa Cruz Chamber Players; former Executive Director of Mohawk Trails Concerts, Inc., Shelburne Falls, MA; grant writer and consultant to other area non-profit organizations; President of Arcadia Players Board of Directors for nearly five years.


Robert Creed, Advisory Board, is Emeritus Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He has published widely on Beowulf and comparative oral traditions. He served as President of Arcadia Players for several years.
 


Walter B. Denny, Clerk, Board of Directors – Professor of Art History and Adjunct Professor of Near Eastern Studies, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Consulting Curator for Islamic Art, Smith College Museum of Art; currently member of Board of Governors, Institute of Turkish Studies; Chair of the International Conference on Oriental Carpets; Exhibitions Planning Committee, Asia Society; Collections Committee; Harvard University Art Museums, Advisory Board, Center for Anatolian Ethnography and Textiles. Former Trustee of The Textile Museum; former member, Visiting Committees of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Fitchburg Art Museum, The Museum for Textiles; former president, Historians of Islamic Art, singer with Arcadia Players and other musical groups. See also his page at the UMass Art History Department's website.


Priscilla Drucker, Advisory Board, recently retired after twenty years of producing and hosting classical music shows at public radio station 88.5/WFCR, where she also took part in fundraising and promotion. Earlier she worked in programming and production at KUT-FM in Austin, and produced a nationally-distributed concert series at the Eastman School of Music. She holds an A.B. in music from Brown and an M.A. in musicology from Eastman. Besides tending her writing/editing business and working with Arcadia Players, Priscilla sings alto with Da Camera Singers.


Alan Durfee – Professor of Mathematics, Mount Holyoke College; organist, harpsichordist and clavichordist; founding member of the Boston Clavichord Society, serving as its first president; singer with the Five College Early Music Collegium; member of the American Guild of Organists and Early Music America; substitute organist for many local churches. Treasurer of Arcadia Players for several years. See also his page at Mount Holyoke College's website.


Bob Eisenstein, Advisory Board – Director of the Five College Early Music Program including the Five College Early Music Collegium and the Euridice Ensemble; teacher of music history and director of madrigal singers at Mt. Holyoke College; visiting lecturer at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA; plays viola da gamba as a founding member and program director of the Folger Consort, Washington, DC; also plays with the New York Renaissance Band, Cappella Nova, the New York Consort of Viols, the Washington Bach Consort and the National Symphony Orchestra. See also his page at Mount Holyoke College's website.


Matilda (Tilli) Friedrich, Treasurer, Board of Diectors, is a new resident of the Valley, having moved here from Madison, Wisconsin in November of 2007 to be near her daughter. She has a long history of choral singing including the Radcliffe Choral Society (president), the Bach Society in Lafayette, Indiana, and the Philharmonic Chorus in Madison, but now focusses her attention on the alto recorder.  In Wisconsin she worked as a social worker and as a team leader for human services in the Governor’s budget office. In addition to her daughter she is the mother of 3 sons.


Thomas Marc Futter, Founding Patron, Advisory Board – Former president of Kellogg Brush Manufacturing Company, Easthampton, MA; board member of the Mass Cultural Council, Springfield Symphony Orchestra, WGBY, Springfield, Musicorda, Springfield Library and Museums Association; Art Advisory Board, Mount Holyoke College, MIFA, Bay Path Hospital, Easthampton Savings Bank, and the Solomon Schechter School, Northampton.


Gregory Hayes, Advisory Board,
has taught piano and harpsichord at Dartmouth College since 1991. He is a busy chamber musician and orchestral keyboard player, and has appeared as soloist with the Springfield Symphony Orchestra. He plays harpsichord, piano, and celesta regularly for the Albany Symphony Orchestra, and has also performed with the Vermont Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestra of St. Luke's (New York), and Arcadia Players. He has participated often in the New England Bach Festival and Marlboro Music Festival, and on the Mohawk Trail Concerts series. He is longtime music director for the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence (Massachusetts). Mr. Hayes is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Amherst College and the Manhattan School of Music. He has also studied at the Hartt School of Music and, for several summers, at the Baroque Performance Institute at Oberlin College. His teachers have included Ming Tcherepnin, Kenneth Fearn, Dora Zaslavsky, and Raymond Hanson. He has written frequently on music, including liner notes for many recordings and articles and reviews for magazines and newspapers. He lives in Goshen (Massachusetts) and has taught for many summers at Greenwood Music Camp in nearby Cummington.


Jane Hershey, Advisory Board,
studied with Wieland Kuijken at The Hague Conservatory, and at the Longy School of Music with Gian Silbiger. She has toured and recorded with the Boston Camerata; as a member of the trio Charivary, she has been a frequent guest at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and in other early music series around the country. As a violone player, she has played with the Smithsonian Chamber Orchestra, Monadnock Music, and the Santa Fe Baroque Orchestra, and has performed with the Arcadia Players since its beginning. As a specialist in Renaissance music, she has toured as a guest artist with the ensemble Hesperus and recorded with them on the Koch and Dorian labels. She can be heard on a 2005 Centaur release of music of Jacquet de la Guerre with Frances Fitch and friends. Jane teaches in the graduate program in Early Music at the Longy School of Music, at Powers Music School. She has directed the Tufts Early Music Ensemble since 1995.



Margaret Irwin-Brandon, Arcadia Players Artistic Director Emerita and Advisory Board member, is a specialist in early keyboard instruments and a concert recitalist in the Americas and Europe. Her harpsichord performances of J. S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier in New York’s Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall were received with critical acclaim. She has been a soloist in many European and American festivals and has performed in national and regional conventions of the American Guild of Organists and the Organ Historical Society. As founding artistic director of the Arcadia Players Baroque Orchestra, Chorus, and Chamber Ensembles, she produced “Arcadia Players – A Baroque Celebration presented by WGBY-TV in 1992. She also produced Arcadia Players’ first fully staged Baroque opera and premiered Richard Einhorn’s score, Voices of Light, for the classic film, La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc. As a Fulbright Scholar in Germany, she studied organ with Karl Richter and continued harpsichord studies with Gustav Leonhardt. Irwin-Brandon serves as director of music at the Unitarian Universalist Society of Greater Springfield, Massachusetts. She is an associate fellow at Davenport College of Yale University and has served on the faculties of the Oberlin College Conservatory, the University of Oregon, Portland State University, and Mount Holyoke College.


Monica Jakuc Leverett, Board of Directors – Monica Jakuc Leverett is the Elsie Erwin Sweeney Professor Emerita of Music at Smith College, where she has taught from 1969 until 2008. She has appeared as a solo and chamber music pianist on three continents, has commissioned a number of works by living composers, and is a champion of women composers. She graduated from the Juilliard School of Music in New York City. Ms. Jakuc Leverett has performed on early pianos since 1986 and appears as a frequent guest soloist with Arcadia Players. She is a proud owner two fortepianos made by Paul McNulty: a 6 1/2 octave 1819 Conrad Graf fortepiano copy, and a 5 1/2 octave fortepiano after designs of Anton Walter.  See also her page at Smith College's website.


Arthur F. Kinney, Board of Directors,
is Thomas W. Copeland Professor of Literary History and Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Latest books are "Shakespeare's Webs," "Shakespeare and Cognition," "Shakespeare, Computers and The Mysteries of Authorship," and "Elizabethan and Jacobean England: Sources and Documents." See his page at the UMass Amherst English Department website.


Christopher Krueger, Advisory Board
. A graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music, Christopher Krueger was a student of James Pappoutsakis. He has performed as principal flutist with the Boston Symphony, the Boston Pops, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and the Opera Company of Boston, among other organizations, and is a member of Collage New Music and Emmanuel Music. As a Baroque flutist, he has been a soloist on the Great Performers Series at Lincoln Center, the Philadelphia Bach Festival, Tanglewood, Ravinia, the Berlin Bach Festival, and elsewhere throughout North America and Europe. He is a member of the Bach Ensemble and the Aulos Ensemble, and is principal flutist with the Handel and Haydn Society and Boston Baroque. His recordings can be heard on Sony, DG, Decca, EMI, Nonesuch, Pro Arte, CRI, Telarc, Koch, and Centaur.   Krueger is Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and is on the faculty of New England Conservatory, Boston University, and Oberlin’s Baroque Performance Institute.


Dana Maiben, Advisory Board.  Violinist, composer and conductor Dana Maiben, hailed by the Boston Globe for her “supremely joyous artistry,” played principal violin for Arcadia Players for many years and was music director for the ensemble’s 10th anniversary season, among other occasions. Maiben was a founder member of Concerto Castello, a groundbreaking ensemble for 17th century music, and in 2002 she launched a new ensemble for the period, Concerto Incognito. Colin Tilney, writing in Continuo Magazine, called her “high priestess of the Italian 17th century solo.” Maiben has served as concertmaster of the New York Collegium under the direction of Christophe Rousset, Martin Gester, Paul Goodwin, and Andrew Parrott. She has often performed with her principal teacher, violinist Jaap Schroeder, and in duo with fortepianist Monica Jakuc Leverett. Maiben is founding Music Director of Foundling, a baroque orchestra based in Providence, R.I. At the Longy School of Music she teaches violin, chamber music, and a wide range of performance practice styles, and occasionally directs opera. Her own opera, based on Gertrude Stein’s play Look and Long, has been presented in staged workshop at Smith College. Maiben’s credits include recordings on Centaur, Deutsche Harmonia Mundi, Dorian, EMI, fuga libera and Hyperion.


Deena Maniscalchi, Board of Directors, received her B.A. in English Literature and an M.B.A. in Finance and Marketing. She combined her love of the arts with work as a promotion writer and marketing consultant for arts and entertainment clients.  A longtime writer for Springfield Symphony Orchestra and The Big E, she also served as promotion manager and public relations director of WWLP-TV.  She is the author of Driving Vision: The Story of Peter Pan Bus Lines (2000), a 175-page history commissioned by Peter L. Picknelly to commemorate the 65th anniversary of the bus line. Deena earned her J.D. in 2005 from Western New England College. She was a judicial law clerk for the Justices of the Massachusetts Superior Court for two years.  She is presently an associate at the law firm of Smith & Brink, P.C., in its Springfield office.



Charles Page, Advisory Board – Charles Page holds a Bachelor’s degree from Boston University and a Master of Music degree from Yale University.  He also spent a year in Amsterdam on a Fullbright Fellowship.  Professor Emeritus at Bay Path College in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, Mr. Page was director of music there for thirty-five years.  He is Minister of Music Emeritus at historic “Old First Church” in Springfield, Massachusetts.  In conjunction with the Board of Music of the Church, he inaugurated and was Artistic Director of the “Music at First” series.  Mr. Page retired from his position at Old First church at the end of August, 2005.  He was Chairman of music programs for Springfield’s Bicentennial celebrations and has served on the Boards of Directors of Project Opera of Massachusetts and the Community Music School of Springfield, The Musical Advisory Board of the Springfield Symphony, and the Board of the Association of Yale Alumni.  He is a founding member and immediate Past President of the national United Church of Christ Musicians Association, Inc.  A member of the American Guild of Organists, he served as General Chairman of the Regions I and II Convention (New England, New York, and New Jersey) of the Guild.  He is former Massachusetts State Chairman and subsequently served as District Convener for the Guild.


Alice Robbins, Player's Representative to Board of Directors, is principal cellist and viol soloist with Arcadia Players. Vitally active in the historic performance ensemble since its inception in 1989, she has served as interim artistic co-director. Robbins has performed widely on baroque cello, viola da gamba, and vielle in numerous ensembles, including the Early Music Quartet (Studio der frühen Musik), Concerto Vocale, Smithsonian Chamber Players, Boston Early Music Festival, Boston Camerata, New England Bach Festival, Violins of Lafayette, and the Oberlin and Boston Consorts of Viols. She was a founding member of Concerto Castello, an international quintet specializing in the music of the early 17th century, and currently performs with Handel & Haydn Society, Opera Lafayette, and Washington Bach Consort as well as Arcadia Players. She frequently appears as viola da gamba soloist with orchestras including Washington Bach Consort. A member of the Five College Early Music faculty at Smith and Mount Holyoke Colleges, Robbins has also taught in the Historic Performance department at Boston University. She earned degrees at Indiana University and the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, where she was a student of Hannelore Mueller. Robbins has recorded for Telefunken, Deutsche Harmonia Mundi, fuga libera, Smithsonian, and Gasparo records, as well as for many radio productions.


Peter W. Shea, Board of Directors – Peter W. Shea has sung professionally since 1972 throughout New England and the Hudson Valley. He often appears as a featured soloist with choral societies, orchestras and chamber music ensembles, is a member of several area vocal ensembles, and gives frequent solo recitals. In the 2003-2004 season he was interim co-Artistic Director of Arcadia Players, and as part of that season he sang Schubert's Winterreise with fortepianist Monica Jakuc in March 2004. He is also cataloger of music and foreign languages at the W.E.B. Du Bois Library, UMass Amherst, and is developing a web-based performer's guide to musical settings of the German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine. See also Peter's personal web-page for upcoming performances.



Barbara Stroup, Board of Directors - received her B.A. in English and her M.A. in Audiology, a field she practiced for 33 years in Vermont and in western Massachusetts. She now works as an indexer of books and academic journals, and has been an administrator for Springfield Cultural Council and Springfield Arts Festival. Barbara designs and produces fiber and mixed media art and plays piano and concertina.




Meredith Young, Advisory Board – B.S Johns Hopkins, honors in biology: M.B.A., University of Chicago in Marketing; Chicago Sun-Times, Marketing and Sales Department; Little, Brown Co; Over almost twenty years at Channing Bete- positions in Advertising, Publishing, and International Operations; former Vice President of Operations for Publishing and Advertising. Now, Director of Survey Research. Volunteers for varied organizations including youth mentoring programs; former President, Music In Deerfield.





Ian Watson, Arcadia Players’ Artistic Director, played an important role in the British Baroque revival which brought such renowned orchestras into prominence as the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, the English Chamber Orchestra, the English Baroque Soloists, the Monteverdi Choir and The Sixteen, with all of whom he has performed as organist, harpsichordist, solo pianist and/or director. Ian’s versatility is revealed in the equal ease with which he performs the roles of orchestral conductor, choir director, organist, harpsichordist, pianist, teacher and public speaker.
    Among Ian’s many prestigious conducting engagements are Monteverdi’s Vespers at St. James’s Palace in the presence of Her Majesty the Queen; Bach’s B Minor Mass at the Rheingau Festival with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields Orchestra and Chorus; the opening concerts of the newly renovated Châtelet Theater in Paris with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra; Christmas Eve at the Royal Albert Hall with the Mozart Festival Orchestra; a tour and video with Nigel Kennedy and the English Chamber Orchestra; and assistant conductor to Sir John Eliot Gardiner in the Bach Cantata Pilgrimage.
    Ian has been the leading keyboard player with most of the major English ensembles, with whom he toured and recorded extensively, as well as being featured on numerous film soundtracks and broadcasts including Amadeus, Mr. Holland’s Opus and Restoration. In the field of opera, Ian has worked at Glyndebourne, and conducted productions throughout England, and internationally at Bremen Opera, Giessen Opera, the Komische Opera, Berlin, and as a Principal Conductor with the Darmstadt State Opera in Germany.
    Ian was born in England in the Buckinghamshire village of Wooburn Common. He won a scholarship at the Royal Academy of Music in London, at the age of 14, where he was awarded all the prizes for organ performance and others for piano accompaniment.  Ian also received the coveted Recital Diploma, the highest award for performance excellence.  As a distinguished graduate, he was honored in 1993, with an Associateship of the Royal Academy of Music, in recognition of his services to music. Ian also has a Fellowship of the Royal College of Organists. His first organ appointment was at St. Margaret’s, Westminster Abbey, at the age of 19, a position he held for ten years. Ian also held a number of prestigious positions in London including Organist of St. Marylebone Parish church, and Music Director of the historic Christopher Wren Church, St. James’s Piccadilly.
    Ian is now Director of Music at St. Paul’s Cathedral in Worcester, Founder and Director of the St. Paul’s Music Festival, Director of the Worcester Collegium and Artistic Director of Arcadia Players.



 

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