Salish Sea Early Music Festival Closing Out its Season

Saturday, June 9, 7 p.m., Orcas Adventist Fellowship Church

— from Jeffrey Cohan for Salish Sea Early Music Festival —

In “Silvius Leopold Weiss,” the final performance of the 2018 Salish Sea Early Music Festival on Saturday, June 9, 2018 at 7:00 PM at the Orcas Adventist Fellowship Church, baroque lutenist Oleg TImofeyev from Iowa City, Iowa and Jeffrey Cohan, on the one-keyed baroque flute, will play reconstructions of music by Silvius Leopold Weiss (1687-1750), the most prolific and highly esteemed lutenist of the baroque who rivaled Johann Sebastian Bach in improvisational skill and worked for more than three decades at the court of the Elector of Saxony in Dresden with flute virtuoso Pierre-Gabriel Buffardin (1689-1768). Although he wrote much music for obbligato, or fully written out, lute and flute, the flute part has unfortunately been lost but has been reconstructed for this performance. The program will also include music for obbligato lute and flute by Ernst Gottlieb Baron (1696-1760) and Friedrich Wilhelm Rust (1739-1796).

Admission will be by free will offering/suggested donation ($15, $20 or $25) with those 18 & under free. For more information please see www.salishseafestival.org/orcas.

Originally from Moscow and now living in Iowa City, OLEG TIMOFEYEV holds an M.A. in early music performance from the University of Southern California (1993), and a Ph.D. in performance practice from Duke University (1999). He taught himself to play the guitar as a child, supervised by his mother (a professional cellist) and his grandmother (an excellent pianist). From 1981 until 1983, Mr. Timofeyev took guitar lessons from Kamil Frauchi, the most influential guitar teacher in Moscow of the time and the father of the internationally-known guitarist Alexandr Frauchi. Since 1983, Oleg Timofeyev has been performing early music on lute and guitar. In 1989 this interest brought him to the U.S. where he studied with Patrick 0’Brien, James Tyler, and Hopkinson Smith. Besides his eminent background in Russian guitar music, Timofeyev has been rediscovering his musical Jewish and Gypsy roots. The recipient of several Iowa Arts Council grants to produce recordings and tours of this music, Timofeyev currently performs a program of Russian Jewish music with his mother. In the fall of 2004, Timofeyev founded a nonprofit organization dedicated to fostering international awareness of Russian culture, the International Academy for Russian Music, Arts, and Culture. The organization helps foster international visibility of the best of Russian cultural traditions including music, music pedagogy, visual arts, architecture, theater, literature, and Russian language.

JEFFREY COHAN has received international acclaim both as a modern flutist and as one of the foremost specialists on transverse flutes from the renaissance through the early 19th century. He won the Erwin Bodky Award in Boston, and first place in the Flanders Festival International Concours Musica Antiqua for Ensembles in Brugge, Belgium with lutenist Stephen Stubbs. First Prize winner of the Olga Koussevitzky Young Artist Competition in New York and recipient of grants from the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund for Music and the French Government, he has performed in more than 25 countries. The New York Times has heralded his ability to “play several superstar flutists one might name under the table.”

The Salish Sea Early Music Festival is proud to be a new affiliate organization of Early Music America, which develops, strengthens, and celebrates early music and historically informed performance in North America.

For the eighth year the festival features some of the finest period instrument specialists from North America and Europe, presenting seven contrasting performances on Orcas Island and all around the Salish Sea of chamber music from the Renaissance through the time of Beethoven on period instruments. The festival has presented countless first performances in modern times of period instrument renditions of early works.

Suggested donation: $15, $20 or $25 (a freewill offering), 18 & under free. For additional information, please see www.salishseafestival.org/orcas.