GUEST ARTISTS
Sarah coffman
Praised for her "deeply expressive singing" (Cleveland Classical) and for performances featuring "unspeakable beauty and poignancy" (Boston Music Intelligencer), Sarah Coffman, Soprano and Early String Player, has performed a variety of repertoire from the middle ages to the present. Now based in Boston, Sarah has appeared with The Boston Camerata, The Thirteen, The New York Philharmonic, Apollo's Fire, Schola Cantorum Boston, Les Délices, and the Ashmont Bach Project, among other ensembles. Sarah is a recent graduate of Case Western Reserve University's Historical Performance program. There, her dissertation, focused on the viola da gamba accompaniments of seventeenth-century English song, received the Adel Heinrich Award for excellence in Musicological Research.
Ellen Hargis
Soprano Ellen Hargis is a specialist in baroque music and a leading voice teacher and lecturer on historical performance practice. She has been a guest lecturer on historical performance, baroque gesture and movement, rhetoric, and opera at Harvard, Yale, The Juilliard School of Music, the Oberlin Conservatory, and the Eastman School of Music, and The Moscow Conservatory, among others. As a soprano, Ms. Hargis has appeared with many renowned conductors, including Andrew Parrott, Gustav Leonhardt, Paul Goodwin, Jane Glover, and Nicolas Kraemer. She performed world-wide in recital with her duo partner, lutenist Paul O'Dette, and has sung with The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Portland Baroque Orchestra, Philharmonia Baroque, Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, the Seattle Baroque Orchestra, and the Mark Morris Dance Group. Ms. Hargis is also known as a stage director specializing in historical opera and has a long-standing collaboration with the Boston Early Music Festival where serves as Assistant Stage Director and the translator of many libretti for their mainstage productions. A prolific recording artist, her discography of more than 50 recordings embraces repertoire from medieval to contemporary music and boasts the Grand Prix du Disque, the Choc du Monde, and two Grammy nominations for best opera recording. Ellen Hargis teaches voice for the Graduate Program in Historical Performance at Case Western University. She served as Artistic co-director of Chicago’s Newberry Consort from 2008 to 2022, and is a 2022 recipient of the Howard Mayer Brown Award for Lifetime Achievement in Early Music.
rosemary heredos
Soprano Rosemary Heredos is a specialist in Early Music with a particular emphasis on Gregorian chant. She holds bachelors degrees in music and English literature from Kent State University, and an MA in Ritual Chant and Song from the University of Limerick, where she studied the Irish sean-nós style with Nóirín Ní Riain, and medieval chant and song with Catherine Sergent.
A church musician since her youth, Rosemary has cantored at Catholic churches around the world, and is currently the Coordinator of Liturgical Music at St. Anselm Church in Chesterland, Ohio. She is also a doctoral student at Case Western Reserve University, pursuing a DMA in Historical Performance Practice. Additionally, she teaches part-time in the Ethnomusicology department at KSU. Her research interests include medieval Marian imagery, adiastematic chant notation, Aquitanian chant, and vernacular devotional music of England and Ireland.
Debra Nagy
Debra Nagy has been called a “musical polymath” (San Francisco Classical Voice) for her accomplished performances as a singer and historical wind player. She is the founder of the Cleveland-based ensemble Les Délices and plays principal oboe with Boston’s Handel & Haydn Society, Apollo’s Fire, and many other ensembles. Inspired by a creative process that brings together research, composition in historical styles, improvisation, and artistic collaboration, Debra creates programs that “can’t help but getting one listening and thinking in fresh ways” (SAN FRANCISCO CLASSICAL VOICE). During the pandemic, Debra reimagined Les Délices’ traditional concert series for the virtual space and created an acclaimed webseries variety show called SalonEra. Other recent projects have included critically-acclaimed multimedia productions of Machaut's medieval masterpiece Remede de Fortune, music from the Leuven Songbook (c. 1470), and an acclaimed CD combining jazz and French Baroque airs called Songs without Words, and The White Cat, a pastiche Baroque opera for singers and chamber ensemble with puppetry and projections based on the Countess D’Aulnoy’s 1690s feminist fairytale. She has recorded over 30 CDs with repertoire ranging from 1300-1800 on the Chandos, Avie, CPO, Capstone, Bright Angel, Naxos, and ATMA labels, and has had live performances featured on CBC Radio Canada, Klara (Belgium), NPR’s Performance Today, WQXR (New York City) and WGBH Boston. www.debranagy.com
ALLEN OTTE
Allen Otte was a co-founder of the historic Blackearth Percussion Group and of Percussion Group Cincinnati, and toured for decades throughout the world performing new and experimental music created for him and his colleagues. Otte regularly presents his own creative work—solo and collaborative performances (The Innocents Project/John Lane; the improvisation trio Vaster Than Empires), often in residencies centered around the theme of performing social justice. He is Professor Emeritus, University of Cincinnati, and in 2017 was inducted into the International Percussion Arts Society Hall of Fame. He has appeared with Trobar since 2018.
SIAN RICKETTS
Sian Ricketts (vocals, winds) enjoys a multi-faceted career as a singer and period woodwinds specialist. She performs medieval, Renaissance and baroque chamber music and orchestral repertoire with ensembles such as Bach Collegium Fort Wayne (IN), Apollo’s Fire (OH), Dallas Bach Society, Piffaro (PA), Forgotten Clefs (VA), and Labyrinth Baroque (NY). Sian is also a co-founding member and co-managing director of the medieval ensemble Alkemie. In addition to her interest in early music, Sian also regularly performs 21st-century repertoire as both an instrumentalist and singer, and has collaborated with composers such as Elliot Cole, Fiona Gillespie, Jonathan Dawe, and Gregory Spears. Sian was a Visiting Medieval Fellow at Fordham University from 2019-2020, and is co-director of Fordham University's Collegium ensemble. Sian holds a D.M.A. in historical performance practice from Case Western Reserve University with concentrations in voice and baroque oboe.
Nadia Tarnawsky
Nadia Tarnawsky spent much of 2017 and 2018 doing research and teaching in Ukraine as a recipient of a Fulbright Award. She has been studying Eastern European singing techniques for nearly three decades and has taught Ukrainian village style singing in workshops for the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, Ukraine, the Center for Traditional Music and Dance in New York, Village Harmony, and the Kitka Women’s Ensemble among others. In 2011 she received a Traditional Arts Fellowship from Artist Trust and an Artist Support Residency from Jack Straw Productions. Nadia sang with Ensemble Hilka of New York in commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the Chornobyl disaster in Ukraine. A recording of this repertoire was released on the Smithsonian Folkways label. She is also a member of Apollo’s Fire and Quire Cleveland.
Edward Vogel
Described by Opera News as “accomplished, stylistically informed,” and “sonorous”, baritone Edward Vogel possesses a diverse repertoire spanning over ten centuries. He has appeared as a soloist with Grammy-winning Apollo’s Fire, True Concord Voices and Orchestra, the Yale Philharmonia, and Juilliard415, as well as at the Tanglewood and Aldeburgh festivals. An avid and in-demand ensemble singer, Mr. Vogel has performed with Theatre of Voices, Bach Collegium Japan, and the Yale Schola Cantorum, with whom he has participated in recordings on the Hyperion label; and regularly works with many of the nation’s finest professional ensembles. As a recitalist, his specialties include British art song of the twentieth century and music from Medieval and Renaissance Iberia. Mr. Vogel is a graduate of the Yale School of Music and Institute of Sacred Music’s Voxtet program for early music, oratorio, and art song, where he studied with James Taylor. edwardvogelmusic.com
peter walker
Described as a “commanding” singer by the Boston Globe, Peter Walker has performed with the Handel + Haydn Society, Chapter House, GRAMMY-nominated Skylark Ensemble, Kuhmo Kamarimusiiki, Staunton Music Festival, Early Music Access Project, Three Notch’d Road, Blue Heron, Pomerium, and GRAMMY-nominated Clarion Society Choir. Peter is a member of the United States Army Chorus, has presented lectures on early music at Vassar College and Case Western, and serves as cantor at the National Shrine of St. Alphonsus Liguori. He won the Overseas Class in the Lowland and Border Pipers’ Society Competition in 2016, and is active as a researcher, transcriber, and arranger of music ranging from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century. Peter holds degrees from Vassar College and McGill University, where he studied with Drew Minter and Sanford Sylvan.
Karin Weston
A cultural nomad, singer Karin Weston has never lived more than four years in one place, with stints in Pakistan, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, Washington, Delaware, California and Ohio. These constant changes in her life have given her the opportunity to experience different modern cultures around the world, and similarly, medieval music provides an avenue for her to explore cultures of past. In her approach to early music, Karin combines musicological scholarship with performance, an approach she bolstered while studying for her Masters in Historical Performance Practice at Case Western Reserve University. Karin has been a voice student of Anne Harley, Dean Southern and Ellen Hargis, and currently studies with Anat Keidar. In addition to her love of medieval music, Karin also sings music of the Renaissance and Baroque periods, and particularly enjoys performing historically staged baroque opera. She has performed in productions of Handel’s Il Pastor Fido and John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera at the Amherst Early Music Festival, as well as a production of L’Incoronazione di Poppea with the Haymarket Opera Company. Karin was recently a Young Artist with the Boston Early Music Festival, understudying the role of Angelica in Steffani's Orlando Generoso. In 2019, Karin won the Barbara Thornton Scholarship from Early Music America to pursue studies in medieval music in Italy and France. Based in New York City, each Sunday Karin can be heard singing with the choir at Church of the Resurrection. Karin is a founding member of Trobár.
tis kaoru zamler-carhart
Tis Kaoru Zamler-Carhart (they/them) is a singer, writer, medievalist, and composer/designer. They are the solo vocalist on five recent albums of contemporary music: “Consolation” by Samn Johnson, “Empty Blank Perfect” by Andrew Noseworthy, “Forsaken Tunes” by Kyle Tieman-Strauss, “Mots Ricos” with Charlie Rauh and Jesse Greenberg, “Minnezang” with Niccolo Seligmann, and the director of two albums of medieval music: “I Frammenti Ascolani” and “Veneto 1440”. Their first book "The Goths & Other Stories" is published by Punctum Books. Their second book "The Diary of Anna Comnena, or the Very Political Adventures of a Transgender Byzantine Princess in African Elevators" is forthcoming. Tis has taught medieval literature, music history, and speculative design at The New School in New York, and medieval music and Latin at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague. They hold various graduate degrees from Stanford and the University of London, and their own music has been performed in a number of countries.