The concerto grosso is a form of baroque music in which the musical material is passed between a small group of soloists and full orchestra. This is in contrast to the solo concerto which features a single solo instrument with the melody line, accompanied by the orchestra.
The theorbo is a plucked string instrument of the lute family, with an extended neck that houses the second pegbox. Like a lute, a theorbo has a curved-back sound box with a flat top, typically with one or three sound holes decorated with rosettes. As with the lute, the player plucks or strums the strings with the right hand while "fretting" the strings with the left hand.
Patrick O'Brien was an American guitarist and lutenist born in New York. He was a recording artist, but was best known as a pedagogue in the field of early plucked instruments in America, and an expert in musicians' hand anatomy. He has worked with musicians on many instruments, reworking their technique around repetitive stress injuries and breakdowns of coordination.
A Baroque orchestra is an ensemble for mixed instruments that existed during the Baroque era of Western Classical music, commonly identified as 1600–1750. Baroque orchestras are typically much smaller, in terms of the number of performers, than their Romantic-era counterparts. Baroque orchestras originated in France where Jean-Baptiste Lully added the newly re-designed hautbois (oboe) and transverse flutes to his orchestra, Les Vingt-quatre Violons du Roi. As well as violins and woodwinds, baroque orchestras often contained basso continuo instruments such as the theorbo, the lute, the harpsichord and the pipe organ.
Hille Perl is a German virtuoso performer of the viola da gamba and lirone.
Paul Raymond O'Dette is an American lutenist, conductor, and musicologist specializing in early music.
Giovanni Zamboni was a baroque composer.
Chitarra Italiana is a lute-shaped plucked instrument with four or five single strings, in a tuning similar to that of the guitar. It was common in Italy during the Renaissance era.
John Moran is an American musician and musicologist. He specializes in historically informed performance of music from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries on the cello and viola da gamba. He studied cello and baroque cello at the Oberlin Conservatory, baroque cello at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, and musicology at King's College London. He has performed and recorded with numerous groups in Europe, including Les Musiciens du Louvre, The Consort of Musicke, English Baroque Soloists. Since 1994 he has lived in the Washington, D.C., area. He is a regular member of REBEL, a New York based baroque ensemble and the music director of Modern Musick, a Washington period-instrument ensemble. He has also appeared with Opera Lafayette, the Washington Bach Consort, the Folger Consort, the Smithsonian Chamber Orchestra and Chamber Players. He teaches viola da gamba and baroque cello at the Peabody Conservatory, where he is also co-director of the Baltimore Baroque Band. He is currently President of the Viola da Gamba Society of America.
Terrell Stone is an American lutenist and recording artist. He is a longtime resident of Italy, where he holds the position of a Professor of lute.
Nigel North is an English lutenist, musicologist, and pedagogue.
Timothy Allen Burris is an American lutenist.
The Atlanta Baroque Orchestra (ABO), founded in 1997 in Atlanta, Georgia, is the first and oldest professional orchestra in the Southeastern United States of America dedicated to historically informed performance, of music from the Baroque era on period instruments. The Atlanta Baroque Orchestra gave its premiere concert in January, 1998. The first director of the ABO was lute and theorbo player Lyle Nordstrom, who departed in 2003. John Hsu, noted performer on the viola da gamba and baryton, took the title of artistic advisor, becoming artistic director in July 2004; he continued through the 2008/2009 season. From 2004 through 2011, the resident director was founding member Daniel Pyle, harpsichordist and organist, instructor of music at Clayton State University, and organist and choir director at the Anglican Church of Our Saviour in Atlanta. Violinist, Baroque dancer and choreographer Julie Andrijeski became artistic director in February, 2011.
The New Dutch Academy (NDA) is an international Dutch Baroque orchestra based in The Hague, the Netherlands. It is composed of 40 international, early music, specialist musicians, who gather in The Hague to explore 18th-century music in all of its forms, including symphonic, chamber, opera and ballet. It performs exclusively on authentic instruments.
Simon Francis Murphy is a Dutch-based, Australian conductor and viola player with a focus on the music of the 18th and early 19th centuries. He is originally from Balmain, Sydney, Australia.
Christina Pluhar is an Austrian theorbist, harpist, conductor, and director of L'Arpeggiata ensemble.
Jakob Lindberg is a Swedish lutenist, performing solo, in small and large ensembles, and also directing operas, using instruments of the lute and guitar families. He is known for the first ever recording of the Complete Solo Lute Music of John Dowland as well as for recording music never before recorded, with repertoire dating back to the Renaissance period.
Gwyn Roberts, an American recorder and traverso soloist, and educator, is a founding co-director of the Philadelphia baroque orchestra Tempesta di Mare with Richard Stone. Roberts also serves as the Director of Early Music at the University of Pennsylvania and is on faculty at the Peabody Conservatory of Johns Hopkins University.
Christopher Wilke is an American composer, lutenist, guitarist, recording artist, and teacher.
Maria Evangelina Mascardi is an Argentinian lutenist, guitarist, and theorbist, resident of Orte in Italy, and a professor of lute at the Conservatorio Antonio Vivaldi in Alessandria, Italy.
