Salish Sea Early Music Festival Presents “Folk Song from Three Centuries”
This year’s “Folk Song from Three Centuries” is a completely new program expanding upon highly innovative research completed for last year’s similar program based on popular and folk music including Renaissance Psalms (~1620), Irish and Scottish baroque (~1720) and folk music as interpreted during Beethoven’s lifetime (~1820). In the early 17th century Flutist Jacob Van Eyck and lutenist Nicolas Vallet both wrote settings of and variations on many of the Psalm tunes from the Geneva Psalter of the mid-16th century that were widely sung in churches 100 years later. These are juxtaposed simultaneously in a manner that sheds new light on early 17th-century practice.
James Oswald’s “Airs for the Seasons” consists of four collections, one for each season, of about 24 airs or multi-movement suites, each dedicated to a particular flower of the season and radiating the charming character of the folk melodies of Oswald’s native Scotland. The wire strung English guitar, so rarely to be heard today, emerged around this time as one of the most prominent instruments of home life in England, and Oswald’s airs beautifully suit Oleg’s instrument made in 1767 alongside the one-keyed baroque flute. Likewise, settings of the popular tunes written specifically for the English guitar by Scotsman Robert Bremner and others are to be heard, following settings from several decades earlier of Irish and Scottish popular melodies by Burk Thumoth and Francesco Barsanti on baroque flute and lute.
Finally, an Eastern European 7-string guitar made in 1820 in Russia and an eight-keyed flute made in London in the same year resonate to variations on popular tunes by Englishman Charles Nicholson, American Joseph Kennedy, Austrian Anton Diabelli and other virtuoso flutists and guitarists of Beethoven’s day.
About the Artists:
OLEG TIMOFEYEV is an American guitarist, lutenist and musicologist, best known for his pioneering work in the discovery, promotion, interpretation, and authentic performance of the repertoire for the 19th- and 20th-century Eastern European seven-string guitar. He began his study of the classical guitar in the early 1980s under the tutelage of Kamill Frauchi in Moscow. In 1989 his musical interests brought him to the U.S., where he studied with Patrick O’Brien, James Tyler, and Hopkinson Smith. He 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.
Timofeyev has performed and taught widely in Europe and the United States. A recipient of numerous scholarly awards, including IREX and Fulbright fellowships, he has taught and lectured at Maimonides State Academy (Moscow), Duke University, the University of Kansas, Northwestern University, Princeton University, the University of Iowa, Grinnell College, and the Smithsonian. His publications include a range of articles on the guitar in Russia, including entries in several standard musical reference works. One of the most prolific Russian guitarists living outside of Russia, he has to date released 12 CD recordings on international labels.
JEFFREY COHAN, who according to the New York Times can “play several superstar flutists one might name under the table”, has performed throughout Europe, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and for the USIA Arts America Program in the South Pacific, South America, Turkey and Portugal. 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 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 is the only musician to have been awarded both the highest prize in the Concours Musica Antiqua in Bruges, Belgium, which he won together with lutenist Stephen Stubbs, and the Erwin Bodky Award in Boston – two of the most prestigious prizes for performers on period instruments. He is artistic director of the Salish Sea Early Music Festival.
