Irish and Russian Music at the Feb 6-7 Early Music Festival Events

Oleg Timofeyev and Jeffrey Cohan bring early Irish, Scottish and Russian music in this weekend's Salish Sea Early Music Festival.

In the second of four 2011 programs of early chamber music on period instruments presented by the first annual Salish Sea Early Music Festival, guitarist Oleg Timofeyev and flutist Jeffrey Cohan will explore two distinct worlds of musical expression in Irish and Scottish Baroque and the Russian Guitar on Orcas Island on Sunday afternoon, February 6 at 1:30 p.m. at the Odd Fellows Hall at 112 Haven Road in Eastsound, on San Juan Island on Sunday evening, February 6 at 7 p.m. at St. David’s Church at 760 Park Street in Friday Harbor, and on Lopez Island on Monday, February 7 at 7 p.m. at Grace Church at 70 Sunset Lane.

Early 18th-century Scottish and Irish works for the one-keyed wooden baroque flute with lute during the first part of the program will include Bridgit Cruise, written for his girlfriend by the blind Irish harper Turlough Carolan, born in 1670, whose music is still widely performed today by Irish folk musicians; a set from Mr. Burk Thumoth’s 18th-century Scottish and Irish Airs including The Yellow hair’d Laddie and The Irish Cry for unaccompanied flute; selections including The Marvel of Peru from Scottish transverse flutist James Oswald’s The Seasons; and a set from A Collection of Old Scots Tunes, published in Edinburgh in 1742 by the Italian composer Francesco Barsanti, who married in Scotland.

On solo lute, Mr. Timofeyev will perform arrangements of I Love My Love, In Secret, and Down the Burne Davie along with other Scottish melodies from the Straloch and Balcarres Lute Manuscripts, two 17th-century Scottish sources.

Russian and European compositions from Beethoven’s time will be heard during the second half on an 8-keyed flute made in London in 1820, similar to those used by Irish folk flutists today, and the Russian 7-string guitar, which acquired a seventh string in Czechoslovakia in Mozart’s day. It was the only guitar to be used in Russia through the early 20^th century.

Music by Ingaz Held and Mauro Giuliani will be performed along with variations on Auld Land Syne, based on a Scottish folk melody with words by the Scottish poet Robert Burns, written in the early 1800’s by American flutist Joseph Kennedy, with whose great-great-great granddaughter Jeffrey Cohan has been in contact.

Timofeyev and Cohan performed a similar program throughout Ukraine last February.

The suggested donation, a free will offering towards expenses, will be $15 for each of the concerts. Youth 18 and under are free. For further information the public is requested to call Grace Church at (360) 468-3477 on Lopez Island, Odd Fellows Hall at (360) 376-5640 on Orcas Island, and St. David’s Church at (360) 378-5360 in Friday Harbor. Please see www.concertspirituel.org for further information.

Oleg Timofeyev in earlier years

Oleg Timofeyev plays the renaissance, 10-course, and baroque lutes, 19th-century guitar, viola da gamba and recorder, and is one of the world’s foremost authorities on the Russian seven-string guitar. He was an Artist in Residence for the School of Music at the University of Iowa, where has been Visiting Assistant Professor for the Department of Russian since 1999. He also has taught at Grinnell College and Cornell College. Mr. Timofeyev has a Ph. D. in Performance Practice from Duke University and has received many fellowships, grants and awards, including two separate Fulbright grants for recent research into the Russian guitar in Moscow and for teaching early plucked instruments in Ukraine. His editions have been published by A-R Editions, and his articles have appeared in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and in the Lute Society Quarterly among other periodicals. In Moscow he founded and directed the still active early music group Pratum Musicum for the Moscow Palace of Culture. He is guest lecturer/ performer with the annual Vanamuusika Päevad, an Estonian early music festival, and directs the annual International Russian Guitar Festival and the International Academy for Russian Music, Arts, and Culture, both in Iowa City, Iowa. He has made many solo recordings for Dorian Recordings.

Flutist Jeffrey Cohan has performed for Chamber Music San Juans, the Orcas Island Chamber Music Festival and for yearly Yuletide Baroque performances in Eastsound. He has performed as soloist in 25 countries, most recently Ukraine, Slovenia and Germany, on all transverse flutes from the Renaissance through the present, and has won the most important prizes for period instrument performance in America and Europe. He has premiered many concerti and other works by Slovenian and American composers. He directs the Capitol Hill Chamber Music Festival in Washington, DC, the Black Hawk Chamber Music Festival in Illinois and Iowa and the Salish Sea Early Music Festival. He can “play many superstar flutists one might name under the table” according to the New York Times, and is “the Flute Master,” according to the Boston Globe.