The Capitol Early Music community is proud to have been with New World Recorders at its beginning. Hear the quartet perform again on Friday October 11. Recently, they have told us more about the ensemble’s members, its founding, and its vision:
Gwyn Roberts, Rainer Beckmann and Héloïse Degrugillier all studied at Utrecht Conservatory in the Netherlands, and Priscilla Herreid studied at Temple University and the Juilliard School. As individual players, we perform with nearly every ensemble that hires recorders on the East Coast and beyond, including the Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra, Handel and Haydn, the Bach Choir of Bethlehem, Boston Baroque, Curtis Opera, the Washington Bach Consort, Piffaro, the Renaissance Band, Trinity Wall Street Baroque Orchestra, the Four Nations Ensemble, American Bach Soloists, Portland Baroque and many more. You can find us teaching at the Amherst Early Music Festival, Pinewoods, Mountain Collegium, Peabody Conservatory, the University of Pennsylvania, the Texas Toot, Oberlin’s Baroque Performance Institute, the Madison Early Music Festival, and anywhere else where recorder players gather to study and play.
The quartet had its genesis in the summer of 2017 when four recorder players who perform with Philadelphia Baroque Orchestra Tempesta di Mare agreed to play Bach’s Art of the Fugue together on Tempesta’s Artist Recital Series. Those concerts in April were followed by an additional performance and a full-day workshop on Fugues, presented by Capitol Early Music in Washington DC. We enjoyed the project so much that we decided to name the group.
Professional recorder quartets are fairly common in Europe, where three of us studied, but not so much in the US, where we all live. We are excited to fill this special niche in the musical world.