Arcadia Players - New England's Period Instrument Ensemble

Arcadia Players embraces 
historical performance 
practice to illuminate 
and invigorate the 
great Western heritage 
of vocal and 
instrumental music.

Carolyn Holstein

Walter Denny

Margaret Irwin-Brandon

Arthur Kinney

Suzan Smith

Justina Golden

Bios

Jon Solins, President, is an award-winning producer of music and radio programming who for 26 years was Director of Classical Music and Music Projects at WGBH Radio in Boston. Now happily back in the Valley, he hosts classical music on Sunday mornings on WFCR, where he began his public radio career in the 1970’s. He is a member of Da Camera Singers and also directs a small a cappella ensemble performing jazz, pop, and standards. A former board member of the Boston Early Music Festival, the Boston Camerata, and the Boston Children’s Chorus, he is happy to help support early music in our region by serving on the Arcadia Players board.

Carolyn Holstein, Vice-President has been a supporter of Arcadia Players since its beginning, but only joined the Board of Directors in the last couple of years, since retirement as organist at the Amherst Unitarian Society and Zoning Board staff for the Town of Amherst.  She was a part of Amherst Town government for 35 years, she has switched her volunteering skills to Arcadia Players, and loves helping to bring such outstanding music to the Pioneer Valley. 

Marilyn Brayne, of Amherst, holds a Master of Arts from McGill University in her native Montreal.  She is the Organist and Minister of Music at Amherst's South Congregational Church. Marilyn brings the joy of sharing sacred music to young and old alike.  In 2012 she supervised the installation at South Church of the restored 1896 Casavant organ by Czelusniak et Dugal.  With a Bachelor of Music in School Music, she also teaches general music to all students at Hadley Elementary School.

Walter Denny, Clerk, is Distinguished Professor of Art History at the University of Massachusetts, where he has taught for forty-six years.  He performed with Arcadia Players for sixteen years, retiring in 2007, and in 2017 is the longest-serving member of the Board of Directors. He is married to Alice Robbins, one of the founding members of Arcadia Players. His website is at www.wbdenny.com
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Jeff Goodhind is the Librarian at the Arthur F. Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies. https://www.umass.edu/renaissance.  He holds a BA in History from Bard College and an MA in Library Science (Archives and Records Management) from Simmons College.

Margaret Irwin-Brandon, Artistic Director Emerita, 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. 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, and is a member of the Board of Advisors to the Boston Clavichord Society. In November, 2017 she will lead her eighth cultural/organ tour in Italy, this tour focusing on organs of Rome and Sicily

Gregory Hayes has taught piano and harpsichord since 1991 at Dartmouth College, where he is a Senior Lecturer. He is a busy collaborative musician and has performed on keyboard instruments of various kinds with Arcadia Players and also with the Springfield, Vermont, and Albany Symphony Orchestras. He has participated often in the New England Bach Festival and Marlboro Music Festival, and on the Mohawk Trail Concerts series in western Massachusetts. Mr. Hayes is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Amherst College and of the Manhattan School of Music. A resident of Goshen (Massachusetts), he has taught for many summers at Greenwood Music Camp in nearby Cummington.


Arthur F. Kinney is Thomas W. Copeland Professor of Literary History Emeritus at UMass Amherst.  He was the founder and first Director of the UMass Renaissance Center and the Bachelor of Independent Studies program.  He edits the international journal English Literary Renaissance and the book series Studies in Early Modern Culture for UMass Press.  He is the author or editor of many books on the Renaissance and on modern American Literature.

Alice Robbins, Player Representative to the Board of Directors, performs widely on baroque cello and viola da gamba with period instrument ensembles. She also teaches at Smith and Mount Holyoke Colleges in the Five College Early Music Program, as well as viol workshops around the US and Canada. Alice has served as Arcadia Players' principal cellist since its founding with Meg Irwin-Brandon.

​Suzan Smith​​ is a lifelong singer who is especially fond of Renaissance and Baroque music, and who sang with Arcadia Players in its early years. She is retired from UMass Amherst Health Services and is married to Peter Shea. Suzan can be found on duty at the box office at Arcadia Players concerts, and outdoors much of the time when not involved with music.

Lou Conover​​ has been performing on various instruments from an early age and currently plays bass gamba with the Five College Early Music Program. He is retired from  a career as a software engineer and mathematics teacher. He returned in December of 2016 from ten years working in China, where he taught high school mathematics and performed regularly on gamba, introducing the instrument to Chinese audiences. He is currently focused on his artwork, creating art on structures in cedar shingles (shingledesigns.com). In addition to serving on the board of directors, he is the webmaster for the Arcadia Players organization.

Justina Golden is a mezzo-soprano, voice teacher and conductor who has lived, taught and sung in the Pioneer Valley for over thirty years.  Through her Profound Sound Voice Studio in Florence she teaches students ages 15 through 85 the joy of riding the river of the wind.  She teaches at Smith College and is a member of the Illuminati Vocal Arts Ensemble.  She appears in concerts of classical music, folk and early music all over the Northeast.  In 2005, she released “Flos Regalis (Royal Flower),” a live record of early music performed with folk and early music professionals.  To accompany her love of crafting, she insists on Sunday Morning Baroque streaming in her home every day of the week!

​Sally Sutherland has been following Arcadia Players ensembles around the Valley for nearly as long as these extraordinary musicians have been playing and singing.  She retired from the faculty of Mount Holyoke College in 2019, having taught English courses since the early 1980s and served in half a dozen academic administrative posts at both Mount Holyoke and Amherst Colleges.  A Shakespearean by training, she holds degrees from Skidmore College and Columbia University, and has written on the seventeenth-century English court masque and Jacobean revenge tragedy.  Her interests, like the interests of Arcadia Players, lie at the intersections of drama and music, performer and audience, early modern and baroque.  

Jon Solins

Marilyn Brayne

Jeff Goodhind

Alice Robbins

Lou Conover

Sally Sutherland

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