Biography
“The most fascinating crossover group in the whole world”
DOLOMITEN, Bolzano, Italy
“A postmodern medley of fun”
THE ARIZONA STAR
Hesperus, innovative, historically informed and multi-cultural, specializes in fusions of historic and living traditions. Founded in 1979 and named for Venus and the West Wind, the four member group comprises several ensembles with overlapping membership that perform three kinds of programs: cultural portraits featuring early and traditional music from a single culture, crossover fusions of European medieval and Renaissance music with American traditional styles such as Appalachian, Cajun, vaudeville and the blues, and single-genre early music programs of medieval, renaissance and baroque music.
Hesperus has toured nationally and internationally for more than two decades. Recently, the ensemble revisited the Misiones de los Chiquitos Festival in Bolivia and the Tage Alte Musik Festival in Regensberg, Germany. Hesperus has also made a five-week tour of the Far East for the United States Information Agency. Nationally, Hesperus has traveled from Maine to Hawaii with performances at the Great Performers Series at Lincoln Center, the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, SC, Carnegie Hall, The Kennedy Center, The Yale Collection of Musical Instruments, The Cloisters of the Metropolitan Museum, the Winter Park Bach Festival, Spivey Hall, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Ryman Auditorium, and for the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. In 2003, HESPERUS represented the Smithsonian Institution for Long Beach, California’s annual Smithsonian Week Festival. For three seasons, Hesperus was a resident ensemble at the Carmel Bach Festival in Carmel, California, giving outreach concerts throughout the Monterey Peninsula.
In the Washington, DC area, Hesperus continues to appear regularly at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, where it was an ensemble in residence from 1989 to 1996. Last season the ensemble was featured at the Library of Congress for a special American Christmas Concert. Currently the group is in its fifth year as an ensemble-in-residence in Arlington County, Virginia, after additional residencies at Georgetown University and the University of Maryland - College Park. A frequent visitor to virtually every museum on the Mall, Hesperus also performed for the President and Mrs. Clinton’s State Department dinner honoring the 250th anniversary of Thomas Jefferson’s birth. In 1998, 1999, 2000, 2002 and 2003, the Washington Area Music Association awarded Hesperus a WAMMIE Award.
Hesperus can be heard regularly on PRI and NPR, CNN and CBS’ Nightwatch, the Voice of America and the Canadian Broadcasting System, as well as a score of international public radio stations. Highlights of the ensemble’s film work: selections from Spain in the New World were used on the international PBS special on Columbus’ voyage, The Buried Mirror. Portions of the CD American Roots can be heard on the Paramount film Sleepy Hollow. More recently, HESPERUS provided medieval music for the Hallmark Channel films, Reluctant Saint: Francis of Assisi, (broadcast on Easter Sunday, 2003), and Patrick: Patron Saint of Ireland (March, 2004).
The ensemble’s awards include the Baltimore Chamber Music Award, The Elizabeth Campbell Award from the Arlington Chapter of the AAUW, and the Music and Humanity Award from Gretna, PA.
Hesperus’ goal is to educate as well as to entertain. Hesperus presents formal and informal concerts, lecture demonstrations, teacher training workshops, school informances, and residencies specializing in programs tailored to minority and young audiences. In recognition of these efforts, Hesperus was named the first winner of the annual Logan Chamber Music Award for Outstanding Educational Programming.
Hesperus has recorded fifteen CDs for the Maggie’s Music, Dorian Discovery, Golden Apple and Koch International labels. The ensemble’s most recent CD, Colonial America, was released in September 2003.
TINA CHANCEY
“Beautiful in warmth, focus and expressivity, the pardessus sang like a human voice in Chancey’s sensitive hands.”
CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER
“Chancey, her every phrase beautifully shaped, stretched the music’s refined vocabulary to the limit: musicianship aside, it was technically a virtuoso performance.”
WASHINGTON POST
TINA CHANCEY, a founding member and Director of HESPERUS, is also a former member of the Folger Consort, the Ensemble for Early Music and the New York Renaissance Band. A multi-instrumentalist specializing in early bowed strings from the rebec and vielle to the kamenj, viol and lyra, she has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts to support solo performances on the pardessus de viole at the Kennedy Center and Weil Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall. She has performed with the National Symphony, Brooklyn Philharmonia, with Victoria de los Angeles at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with Sephardic musician Flory Jagoda, QUOG, an improvisational multi-media music theater group, and the early music ensembles, the New York Consort of Viols, Waverly Consort, Terra Nova Consort, Ex Umbris, and La Rondinella. Dr. Chancey received her PhD in Musicology from the Union Institute. Her articles on early music appear in scholarly and popular publications, and she has recorded for a score of labels from Arabesque to Windham Hill. She directs “What’s That Note, Inc.,” teaching sight singing and ear training to amateur singers, and also works as an independent recording producer.
GRANT HERREID is a multi-instrumentalist and singer who performs frequently on winds, strings and voice with Hesperus and Piffaro, and plays theorbo and lute with the baroque ensemble Artek. He also teaches at Mannes College of Music and directs the New York Continuo Collective. Grant has created and directed several theatrical early music shows, including 'Il Caffe d'Amore', a pastiche of early 17th century Italian songs and arias. For the Amherst Early Music Festival he has created and directed a number of productions, featuring German alchemy, English gypsies, French fools, Italian zanies, and Death. But mostly he devotes his time to exploring the esoteric unwritten traditions of early Renaissance music with the group Ex Umbris.
BRUCE HUTTON has been a member of HESPERUS since 1984 and is also a founding member of the Double Decker String Band, whose performances and recordings have received critical acclaim in the United States, Canada, England, West Germany and Japan. Much of Mr. Hutton's performance work is in the schools; he has appeared in over 1500 schools throughout the East Coast, as well as throughout the D.C. area sponsored by the Washington Performing Arts Society. He is also a member of the string band Roustabout. Mr. Hutton plays a staggering variety of banjos, guitars, mandolins, and lap dulcimers as well as mouth bow, ukelele and kazoo. His solo album, "Old-Time Music--It's All Around," was released on the Folkways label and he has also recorded for Fretless, Heritage, Greenhays/Flying Fish, Golden Apple, Dorian, Marimac and Kicking Mule.
ROSA LAMOREAUX, soprano, is hailed for her versatile musicianship and her radiant and effortless singing. She performs with Hesperus, the Folger Consort, Arcovoce, and has toured with Musicians from Marlboro. Ms. Lamoreaux is a frequent soloist at Bach Festivals including Carmel, CA., and Bethlehem, PA.; with the late Robert Shaw and the Atlanta and Cincinnati Symphony Orchestras; at Carnegie Hall, Kennedy Center, Dorothy Chandler Pavillion; Belvedere Schloss, Austria; and at the Rheingau Festival in Germany. In Washington, DC she has performed at the National Gallery of Art, Library of Congress, Phillips Collection, Washington National Cathedral, the Washington Chamber Symphony, Smithsonian Chamber Orchestra; She is frequently heard on National Public Radio, and has sung recitals and chamber music for festivals throughout Europe, Central and South America. She has recorded Luminous Spirit: chants of Hildegard von Bingen, I Love Lucette, Dancing Day and Spain in the New World, Messe Solennelle of Berlioz, Four Centuries of Song with the National Gallery Vocal Quartet; and Gentle Annie: songs of Stephen Foster and Charles Ives for Koch International Classics. She has also recorded the B minor Mass with the Bethlehem Bach Festival for the Dorian Group.
Instrumentation
Tina Chancey (Director and Founding Member): medieval strings, viols, pardessus de viole, early and traditional fiddle.
Grant Herreid: lute, early guitar, cittern, recorders, tenor
Bruce Hutton: guitars, banjos, lap dulcimer, mandolin, Nation Steel guitar, ukulele
Rosa Lamoreaux: soprano
Frequent guests:
Bonnie Rideout: Scottish fiddle
Mike Seeger: Appalachian music
Charles Williams: singer/actor
Nell Snaides: soprano
Zan McLeod: guitar, bazouki
Discography
Colonial America - From the first colonists to the American Revolution and the birth of our republic, Hesperus' music reflects a time of new ideas, freedom and vitality. In town and village, parlor and ballroom, from the Appalachian mountains to the great concert halls hear the musical pulse of early American music performed on a wide variety of fok and early music instruments.
The Banshee's Wail - Scott Reiss's tour-de-force on recorders and Irish whistle, with the legendary percussionist Glen Velez, consummate guitar and bazouki player Zan McLeod, and virtuoso early/traditional string player Tina Chancey.
My Thing is My Own - Bawdy songs from Thomas D’urfey’s collection Pills to Purge Melancholy. D’Urfey wrote original words to common tunes. Some were political or topical, but these explore the full range of love, sex, and seduction in the 18th century.
Food of Love - Renaissance instrumental music from the British Isles. Dances, ayres, divisions and variations, featuring HESPERUS’ trademark — improvisation.
Dancing Day - Traditional Christmas music from the British Isles, Italy, and Germany spanning the Middle Ages to the 18th century with Rosa Lamoreaux.
Spain in the New World - Spanish and Native American music from New Spain, 16th to 18th centuries.
Baroque Recorder Concerti - Concertos by Telemann, Vivaldi, Graupner, Naudot, and Babel featuring recorder virtuoso Scott Reiss.
Celtic Roots - Award-winning recording of Scottish and Irish traditional music from the earliest written sources.
Luminous Spirit: Chants of Hildegard von Bingen
Soprano Rosa Lamoreaux sings the chants of the 12th-century abbess, to the improvisational accompaniment of Scott Reiss (recorder and hammered dulcimer) and Tina Chancey (vielle and kamenj).
I Love Lucette - Songs and instrumentals from the French Renaissance theater, with Rosa Lamoreaux.
Unicorn - The medieval/Appalachian fusion of the HESPERUS crossover trio (Scott Reiss, Tina Chancey and Bruce Hutton) is expanded to include Scandinavian and African world music, joined by award-winning Old-Time fiddler Bruce Molsky.
Neo-Medieval - Medieval polyphony and improvisations on lute, recorder, vielle, saz, dombek, kamenj, dulcimer and vielle with Scott Reiss, Tina Chancey, and Grant Herreid.
Barthelemy de Caix: Six Sonatas for two Pardessus de Viole - The Duo Guersan, Tina Chancey and Catherina Meints, perform this remarkable collection of duets for the rarest of rare early instruments, the pardessus.
Early American Roots - Tina Chancey, Scott Reiss and Mark Cudek explore a cross-section of the most vital popular music from Colonial and Federal America.
Patchwork - A re-issue of HESPERUS’ popular crossover CD For No Good Reason At All, a fusion of medieval, Renaissance, Appalachian, ragtime, vaudeville and the blues, all on more than 25 early and traditional instruments.
Links
| http://hesperus.org |
| Hesperus Website |
| Class Acts on Tour |