GUEST ARTISTS 2023-24
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.
PRISCILLA HERREID
Priscilla Herreid plays period wind instruments with some of the finest ensembles in the US and abroad.
A longtime member of Piffaro the Renaissance Band, Priscilla is now their Artistic Director, having begun her leadership of the preeminent ensemble in the 2022-2023 season. Recent appearances include The Handel + Haydn Society, Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, Tenet Vocal Artists, The Metropolitan Opera, The Newberry Consort, The Dark Horse Consort, The Sebastians, The Gabrieli Consort, and The Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra. Priscilla also accompanies silent films with Hesperus, sings the Latin Mass in New York City, and was part of the onstage band for Twelfth Night and Richard III on Broadway. Priscilla’s playing has been called “downright amazing” by The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The New York Times has praised her “soaring recorder, gorgeously played...”
SHAWN KEENER
Trained as a music historian, Shawn Marie Keener is an editor, indexer, and graphic designer based in Chicago. Her scholarly work examining the intersection of vernacular song and cultural memory in 16th-century Venice was supported by a Fulbright grant (Italy, 2007–08) and a Harper Dissertation-Year Fellowship at the University of Chicago. Since 2012 she has curated and designed projections for live performance and concert videos that are visual extensions of historically informed performance. She has collaborated with the Newberry Consort (Chicago), Les Délices (Cleveland), Blue Heron (Boston), and Severall Friends (Santa Fe). Before launching Keener Editorial in late 2019, Shawn worked for several years at the Newberry Library in Chicago and was for three years a staff editor in the Recent Researches series at A-R Editions (Middleton, WI), the leading North American publisher of scholarly editions of music.
LIZA MALAMUD
Liza Malamut, Artistic Director of The Newberry Consort, has a passion for bringing untold stories and universal themes to life through historical performance.
A trombonist, researcher, and educator throughout the United States and abroad, Liza has performed with premier period-instrument ensembles including Trinity Baroque Orchestra, Mercury Chamber Orchestra, Tafelmusik, Opera Atelier, the Handel & Haydn Society, Dark Horse Consort, Boston Camerata, Piffaro, the Folger Consort, Opera Lafayette, TENET, Apollo’s Fire, and many other ensembles. Her playing can be heard on the Musica Omnia, Naxos, Hyperion, New Focus Recordings, and George Blood Audio labels. She has performed at international venues all over the world, including Carnegie Hall, Washington National Cathedral, the BAM Center, Warsaw Philharmonic Hall, and the Chiesa di San Rocco. Liza is also a founding member of Incantare, an ensemble of violins and sackbuts formed to highlight music of lesser-known and marginalized composers and their contemporaries in early modern Europe and beyond.
A passionate teacher and researcher, Liza has presented masterclasses, lecture recitals, and papers at conferences and institutions throughout the country. Her academic work was supported by an American Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the American Association of University Women, and she is a co-editor and contributor for the book Music and Jewish Culture in Early Modern Italy: New Perspectives with Rebecca Cypess and Lynette Bowring (Indiana University Press).
Liza holds a Bachelor of Music degree in Trombone Performance from Eastman School of Music, where she studied trombone with John Marcellus, and a Master of Music degree from Boston University, where she studied with Don Lucas. She earned her Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Historical Performance from Boston University, where she studied with Greg Ingles. Her dissertation, a method book for modern trombonists, integrates historical techniques with mainstream playing and introduces eighty-eight solo etudes for trombone transcribed from historical sources. She currently teaches historical trombone at Indiana University.
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.
gabriel smallwood
American harpsichordist and organist Gabriel Smallwood (*1997) began his musical training at age three on the piano. Soon thereafter he began nurturing his passion for composition and was a prizewinner at multiple national competitions. His compositions were performed by members of some of the nation’s most esteemed orchestras, including a performance in Carnegie Hall in 2012. At age 19, Gabriel moved to Leipzig, Germany to initially study piano before wholeheartedly devoting himself to the harpsichord and early music. He completed studies in Leipzig and Hamburg before moving to Basel, Switzerland, where he is currently based. Gabriel appears regularly as a soloist and is also highly sought after as a continuo player, having performed with various early music ensembles in the US and throughout Europe. He has participated in masterclasses with renowned artists such as Christophe Rousset, Carole Cerasi, Pierre Hantai and Skip Sempe. In 2023 he was awarded prizes at the Harpsichord Competition „Wanda Landowska in Memoriam” in Poznań, Poland (1st Prize) and the MA Harpsichord Competition in Bruges (3rd Prize and the special „Luigi Ferdinando Tagliavini” prize for the best interpretation of early Italian keyboard music). Currently Gabriel is a student at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, where he studies harpsichord with Francesco Corti, basso continuo with Jörg-Andreas Bötticher as well as medieval and Renaissance keyboards with Corina Marti.
Karin Weston
Soprano Karin Weston specializes in the performance of early music, with repertoire ranging from troubadour songs to Handel opera. Karin is a founding member of Trobár, and has sung with the medieval ensembles Per-Sonat, Dialogos, Ensemble Parlamento, Moirai, Concordian Dawn, Rubens Rosa, Contre le Temps, and Memor. In 2019 she was a recipient of Early Music America’s Barbara Thornton Scholarship. Her ensembles achieved success in the 2023 Van Wassenaer Competition, with Memor receiving the first prize and Contre le Temps receiving second prize and the audience award. She can be heard on Moirai’s album Wa funde man sament so manic liet, and Concordian Dawn’s albums Fortuna Antiqua et Ultra and Medieval Song from Aristotle to Opera, the latter of which was the accompanying CD for scholar Sarah Kay’s book of that title. Also dedicated to baroque music, Karin has sung the roles of Mirtillo (Handel’s Il Pastor Fido), Orazio (Handel’s Muzio Scevola), and Clorinda (Monteverdi’s Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda), amongst others, with ensembles such as the Atlanta Baroque Orchestra and was a Young Artist with the Boston Early Music Festival. Currently based in Basel, Switzerland, she has an MA in Historical Performance Practice from Case Western Reserve University, where she studied with Ellen Hargis, and an MA in medieval and Renaissance music from the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, where she studied with Katarina Livljanić.