Dances and Suites of Rameau and Couperin [play hifi lofi] [license] [buy]

		Mozart 4 Quartets for Strings and Winds [play hifi lofi] [license] [buy]

		The Four Seasons by Vivaldi [play hifi lofi] [license] [buy]

Founded in San Francisco in 1986, American Baroque brings together some of America's most accomplished and exciting baroque instrumentalists, with the purpose of defining a new, modern genre for historical instruments. The group's adventurous programs combine 18th-century music with new works, composed for the group through collaborations and commissions from American composers. An ensemble of eclectic, accomplished, and artful musicians, the performances bridge a gap between the edges of the new music frontier and the familiar roads to music of the past, and expands the repertoire and scope of historical instruments into the new millenium.

In its early stages, American Baroque functioned as a studio band, its mission being to record hitherto unknown quartets by Telemann. Recordings of the "Paris" quartets and the Fourth Book of Quartets were released and enthusiastically received. In 1991, the group recorded French Cantatas of the 18th Century with soprano Julianne Baird, again released to wide critical acclaim on Koch International Classics. In 1992, American Baroque began exploring the territory of performing new music written for historical instruments through its collaboration with composer, member and gambist Roy Whelden and his pieces Quartet After Abel and Gamba Quartet, which resulted in a CD release on the New Albion label in 1993.

Intrigued by the unique timbres and subtlety of sounds inherent in their period instruments as well as the excitement and anticipation of performing new music, the group continued to pursue projects and programming that involved combinations of new and old elements. Another collaboration in 1995 with Whelden yielded the provocative CD Like a Passing River with poet and reader Rudy Rucker, also on the New Albion label.

Since its founding, the ensemble has been featured at the Tage Alter Musik Festival in Regensburg, Germany; the Berkeley Early Music Festival; the San Luis Obispo Mozart Festival; the San Jose Chamber Music Society; University of California; the San Francisco Early Music Society; on National Public Radio and West Coast Live; and in the Opus415 New Music Festival. In addition, ensemble members perform and record together in the finest period-instrument orchestras in America throughout the year. Recent projects include concerts at the University of Vermont and at Bowdoin College, and a multi-tracked studio recording of Songs of Cold Mountain, a cycle of texts by the 7th-century poet Han Shan. The 1998-1999 season included a commercial recording of eight pieces by the composer's collective, Common Sense, which were commissioned in 1996; and a theatrical and multimedia collaboration entitled "The Death of Anton Webern," written and directed by ensemble member Katherine Shao; the group will present a 2-week run of performances in May 2000.

American Baroque has also received support from Chamber Music America's Millenium Commissioning Program to collaborate with Stanford University composer Jonathan Berger on his new work, Of Hammered Gold (for flute, oboe, violin, viola da gamba and digital bird organ); the work was premiered at Stanford University's Lively Arts series on January 7, 2000. The ensemble has been recognized through grants and awards from the Aaron Copland Foundation, the Mikhashoff Foundation for New Music, and the Zellerbach Family Fund, and most recently won first prize for the 2000 ASCAP Awards for Adventurous Programming. American Baroque remains the only U.S. chamber ensemble committed to performing both new music and 18th-century works on historical instruments, while continuing to explore the issues raised by both genres, old and new.

Stephen Malinowski, who wrote the software Music Animation Machine has produced the following youtube video which features American Baroque's performance of the first movement of Mozart's Oboe Quartet in F Major, K. 370.

The Artists

Elizabeth Blumenstock is widely recognized as one of the country's leading baroque violinists. A riveting and deeply expressive performer, she is concertmaster and frequent soloist with Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, American Bach Soloists, and the Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra. In addition to her orchestral activity, Ms. Blumenstock keeps a very busy schedule of chamber music and is a founding member of the Artaria Quartet, Arcadian Academy, American Baroque, Concerto Amabile, Arcangelli Strings, and Musica Pacifica.

Gonzalo X. Ruiz has been called "a master of expansive phrasing, lush sonorities and deft passagework" by the San Francisco Examiner and "one of a small handful of truly superb baroque oboists in the world" by Alte Musik Aktuell, Germany. He performs and records with Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, Boston Handel & Haydn Society, American Bach Soloists and the Portland Baroque Orchestra, and was a prizewinner at the Brugges International Early Music Competition in Belgium. In addition to an active schedule of chamber music and solo work, he serves on the faculty of the Baroque Performance Institute at Oberlin College. His CD of the Handel sonatas was described by one reviewer as "the best record of baroque oboe music I've heard."

Stephen Schultz, founder of American Baroque, is principal and solo flutist with the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, Musica Angelica of Los Angeles, and performs with the American Bach Soloists, the Portland Baroque Orchestra, and Joshua Rifkin's Bach Ensemble. Currently a lecturer at Holy Names College in Oakland, Schultz's engaging teaching style has left its mark at California State University at Long Beach and Sacramento, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, the University of Southern California, and the University of California at Davis and Los Angeles. Mr. Schultz appears on more than twenty-nine recordings for Harmonia Mundi USA, New Albion, Amon Ra, Koch International Classics, RGB, XDot25, Heru, and the Musical Heritage Society. Innovative playing styles and experimentation with world music groups such as D'CuCKOO and Haunted By Waters have given Schultz a perspective on the music world unparalleled by his peers. Schultz's unique processed baroque flute sounds characterize a new genre of alternative music that offers listeners of early music a new platform to enjoy formerly traditional instruments.

Katherine Shao, harpsichordist and writer/composer, has performed with many of California' finest classical ensembles, including the New Century Chamber Orchestra, Magnificat, and the San Francisco Symphony. A Master's Degree recipient from the University of Indiana's School of Music, she also works frequently in the contemporary music realm, and has incorporated new music and performance art elements in many of her endeavors, including the production of her unique work, The Path to the New Music, a radio drama about the composer Anton von Webern, for which she was the author and executive producer. She is the managing director of the award-winning ensemble, American Baroque, and appears on numerous recordings. In addition to her creative endeavors, Ms. Shao is a senior manager at a local software company, and takes care of her two young children.

Roy Whelden, like most musicians before the twentieth century, balances mutually supportive careers in performance and composition. As a performer on the viola da gamba and vielle, he has played and recorded with such ensembles as Sequentia (Koln), American Baroque, Ensemble Alcatraz, and Musica Pacifica. Mr. Whelden received a Doctorate of Music at the Indiana University School of Music, where he studied with the legendary Thomas Binkley. He has recorded his compositions on the New Albion label, and has arranged countless works, old and new, for American Baroque.

Gonzalo Ruiz talks about his arrangement of Vivaldi's Four Seasons:

"You've never heard the Four Seasons like this before", you hear, and you think to yourself "I've heard that before". Vivaldi's masterpiece has received so many performances and recordings that it has also inspired an impressive number of creative arrangements for everything from synthesizer to accordion quartet to solo recorder to koto ensemble. Many are impressive, amusing, some almost blasphemous to musicians. Nothing of the sort is offered here.

What I have done in my arrangement is simply to follow Vivaldi's own orchestration techniques and adapt them slightly to fit our ensemble. While most listeners know that Vivaldi wrote hundreds of concertos for the violin, few know that he also wrote many concertos that treat a small mixed group of winds and strings like a mini orchestra. This more compact format more than makes up in color what it lacks in numbers. Many of his most popular concertos like "il Gardellino" and "la Tempesta di Mare" survive in these two forms and in many cases the chamber version was the original and the orchestral version the adaptation. Here the violin retains the lion's share of the solos. In my own part I assigned to the oboe some violin lines that may be considered extreme for the instrument, but only by those unfamiliar with the full extent of Vivaldi's oboe writing. The flute assumed very naturally the pastoral solo in Spring and the bird calls in Spring and Summer. The bass part is unchanged from the original. Only the use of a viola da gamba instead of a bassoon departs from standard Vivaldi orchestration. It is a very versatile instrument in this work, functioning as a tenor voice but often as a second reinforcement bass, and even as second violin in a few passages. The barking dog in Spring's afternoon is played on an oboe da caccia without a bell, not Vivaldian, but we think very canine. The harpsichord solo in the last movement of Winter was a whim. Spring was transposed from E to D major and Winter from F to G minor.

The result really is a Four Seasons like you've never heard before. The coloristic aspects of Vivaldi's descriptive composition come to life much more vividly than in the original version while the new texture is instantly perceived as authentically baroque. The "spotlight" that roves from one instrument to another keeps the focus on the ensemble and the work's content, not one soloist. Rather than simply another new spin on a tired classic this is an original but historically plausible version that preserves all the excitement and beauty of the original composition and opens up a whole new dimension of colors drawn from Vivaldi's own palette. It was recorded live in Oakland on February 6, 2000.