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

Robert Eisenstein

Gregory Hayes

Alice Robbins

Margaret Irwin-Brandon

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. 

Walter Denny, Clerk, is Distinguished Professor of Art History at the University of Massachusetts, where he has taught for fifty-one years.  He has been involved with many different musical organizations since the early sixties, and performed with Arcadia players for sixteen years before retiring from singing in 2007. He 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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Andrea Battle is a retired high school teacher from the Bronx, New York, (named Long Island Secondary Teacher of the Year in 2009) with degrees in education and political science, and an M.A. in Chinese Studies from St. John’s University. She has also worked in the corporate world as an advertising sales person at Black Enterprise Magazine and is a certified life coach. Her blog, "In My Own Voice.org" exposes "scams on the internet." A busy volunteer, she worked on affordable housing issues for the Town of Amherst, served on the Amherst Cultural Council for 5 years and is a member of the Amherst Club and the League of Women Voters, Amherst.
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Robert Eisenstein, bass viol, recently retired as director of the Five College Early Music Program, for which he coached and directed student ensembles including the Five College Early Music Collegium and Euridice Ensembles. He studied viola da gamba with Judith Davidoff and Richard Taruskin and is a founding member and co-artistic director of the Folger Consort, the early music ensemble in residence at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., performing on medieval fiddle, violin, and viola da gamba. He taught music history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst as well as music and technology at Mount Holyoke College, and performs regularly with colleagues in the Mount Holyoke Baroque Ensemble. He has performed with many ensembles including the Washington Bach Consort, the Newberry Consort, the National Symphony and Western Wind, and has appeared at Tanglewood, Amherst Early Music, and other summer festivals.

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.

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.

Jim Mead, tenor, has been singing classical music since childhood, beginning with church and boy choirs in the 1960s. While studying engineering at UVa, he performed with the University Singers and the Oratorio Society of Charlottesville. Since 2002, he has been a member of the self-directed group Cantabile and has been a regular chorus member of Arcadia Players and Illuminati Vocal Arts Ensemble. He is president of ProSensing Inc., a local engineering firm creating unique instruments for monitoring
the environment. Jim lives on Astarte Farm in Hadley where he and the crew grow no-till organic fruits and vegetables.

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.

​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.  

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
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Jon Solins

Walter Denny

Andrea Battle

Jeff Goodhind

Jim Mead

Sally Sutherland

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