Wilhelmina Concert May 20 at Odd Fellows Hall

The fifth and final 2012 Salish Sea Early Music Festival performance will be held  on May 20 at Odd Fellows Hall in Eastsound.

John Lutterman, cellist, will join Jeffrey Cohan and John Schneiderman at the Salish Sea Early Music Festival Concerts May 19-20

“An Afternoon with Wilhelmine,” with John Schneiderman on baroque lute, cellist John Lutterman and baroque flutist Jeffrey Cohan on Sunday afternoon, May 20 at 1:30 PM at Odd Fellows Hall at 112 Haven Road in Eastsound.

The program revisits the musical establishment of the court of the lute-playing sister of flutist King Frederick the Great, Wilhelmine, who in the late 1730’s with her husband the Margrave of Bayreuth (who also played the flute) completely transformed that city into the important cultural center that it is today.

The suggested donation, a free will offering towards expenses, will be $15 and $20. Youth 18 and under are free. For further information the public is requested to call Odd Fellows Hall at (360) 376-5640.

The program will feature the Concerti or Opera Nuova for lute, flute and cello by the lutenist Adam Falkenhagen (1697-1754), who in these pieces thoroughly explored the textural capabilities of these instruments in the new galant, or pleasing, style.

In 1731 the sophisticated princess Wilhelmine, who expected to marry the future king of England, was forced by her father the King of Prussia to marry instead the son of the Margrave of Bayreuth, which at that time was an obscure and poorly maintained provincial capital.

Just as her brother Frederick the Great, an excellent flutist and composer, created one of the most influential musical establishments of Europe after the death of their tyrannical father, likewise Wilhelmine and her new husband the Margrave of Bayreuth, also a flute player named Frederick, set about transforming Bayreuth into an artistic capital and cultural showpiece as soon as the Margrave was pronounced head of state in 1735.

In the following year they employed Falkenhagen, who studied with Germany’s most famous lutenist Sylvius Leopold Weiss and whose wife had been a singing colleague of Anna Magdelena Bach. Falkenhagen demonstrates in this music that he was ideally suited to expand upon the musical vision shared by the lute-loving Wilhelmine and her flutist husband.

Concerts will also be held on Lopez and San Juan Islands:

Lopez Island: Saturday, May 19 at 7: p.m.  at Grace Church at 70 Sunset Lane in Lopez Village. Call (360) 468-3477

San Juan Island: Sunday evening, May 20 at 7 p.m. at St. David’s Church at 760 Park Street in Friday Harbor • call (360) 378-5360

Please see www.concertspirituel.org for further information about this and other Salish Sea Early Music Festival performances.

About the performers:

JOHN SCHNEIDERMAN specializes in eighteenth-century lutes and nineteenth-century guitars.  A critically acclaimed virtuoso of plucked instruments since age nine, the young Schneiderman was a familiar face on the stages of bluegrass and folk festivals throughout California.  Mr. Schneiderman studied with British guitar pedagogue and author Frederick Noad, and continued his studies at the Schola Cantorum in Basel, Switzerland with the great modern pioneer of the baroque lute, Eugen Dombois. He is a member of the chamber ensembles Galanterie, and The Czar’s Guitars, and has performed with the Los Angeles Opera, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Los Angeles Master Chorale, Los Angeles Baroque Orchestra, Musica Angelica, Seattle Baroque, Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, Chanticleer, Musica Pacifica and the American Bach Soloists.  His extensive discography, much of it rarely or never before recorded lute and guitar music, includes CDs on the Titanic, AudioQuest, Centaur, VGo, Profil:Edition Günter Hänssler and Dorian Sono Luminus labels.  Mr. Schneiderman is currently on the faculties of the University of California, Irvine and Irvine Valley College, and has been on the faculties of Orange Coast College, California State University, Long Beach and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Please see www.johnschneiderman.com.

Cellist and musicologist JOHN LUTTERMAN has given solo performances in Vienna, Salzburg, Munich, Basel, Belfast, New York, Washington, Sacramento and San Francisco. He is principal cellist of the Capella Sacra, Salzburg, and has performed with the American Bach Soloists, Philharmonia Baroque, Magnificat, Jubilate and the Archangelli Strings. He holds the Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. In March 2006, John completed the Ph. D. in historical musicology at the University of California at Davis, with a dissertation on Bach’s cello suites as artifacts of historical improvisatory practices. His articles have appeared in Early Music America, Strings, and San Francisco Classical Voice. John recently served as Professor of Cello and Music History at Whitman College, and has served on the faculty of Lawrence University, the Wisconsin Conservatory, the Knox School, the University of the Pacific, and SUNY Stony Brook. His teaching and research interests include the history of theory, the ethno-historiographic study of the relation between written and oral/aural musical practices, the aesthetics of absolute music, the history of improvisation, and the historical development of the modern concept of a musical “work.”

Flutist Jeffrey Cohan has performed as soloist in 25 countries as a modern flutist and on all transverse flutes from the Renaissance through the present.  He won both the Erwin Bodky Award in Boston, and the highest prize awarded in the Flanders Festival International Concours Musica Antiqua in Brugge, Belgium.  First Prize winner of the Olga Koussevitzky Young Artist Awards Competition, he has performed throughout Europe, Australia, New Zealand and the United States, and worldwide for the USIA Arts America Program.  He received the highest rating from the Music Panel of the National Endowment for the Arts, and has recorded for NPR in the United States, and for national radio and television in Germany, Switzerland, France, Belgium, Holland, Fiji and the Solomon Islands.  Many works have been written for and premiered by him, including five new flute concerti since 2000.  He is artistic director of the Capitol Hill Chamber Music Festival in Washington, DC 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. Please see www.jeffreycohan.com.

The Salish Sea Early Music Festival presents period instrument performances of chamber music on Orcas, Lopez and San Juan Islands and around the Puget Sound, featuring some of the finest period instrument performers from the Northwest and the USA, Canada and Germany along with artistic director Jeffrey Cohan. Chamber music by familiar and little-known composers from the Renaissance through the present is heard in period instrument performances which shed new light upon early performance practice. Unpublished works from the Library of Congress and other libraries and rarely heard instruments and instrumental combinations that were familiar in earlier times are given particular attention.