Featured Performers - Harpsichord Heaven 2024
Karen Flint • Friday, April 26 at 7:30 pm
Karen Flint is the founding artistic director of Brandywine Baroque with concerts held in Wilmington and Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. Ms. Flint established the Dumont Concerts in 2003, a weekend festival of harpsichord recitals. Now called Harpsichord Heaven, the programs are given on her collection of antique instruments in Delaware. She studied harpsichord with Edward Parmentier and Egbert Ennulat and organ with Fenner Douglass and Paul Terry and has degrees from Oberlin Conservatory of Music and The University of Michigan. Ms. Flint is Adjunct Instructor of Harpsichord at the University of Delaware.
Olivier Baumont • Saturday, April 28 at 7:30 pm
Considered one of the major harpsichordists of his generation, Olivier Baumont has for several decades enjoyed a rich career as a performer, teacher, and researcher. At the Conservatoire national supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris, juries unanimously awarded him first prizes for harpsichord and chamber music. He benefited from the artistic guidance of Huguette Dreyfus and Kenneth Gilbert and was occasionally invited by Gustav Leonhardt to attend his interpretation classes in Cologne. Olivier Baumont has performed at in numerous countries: Germany, Austria, Belgium, Belarus, Brazil, Canada, Croatia, Spain, the United States, Great Britain, Hungary, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Russia, Slovenia, Switzerland and Turkey. In September 2019, he accepted the direction, along with Rosana Lanzelotte, of a new festival in Rio de Janiero, initiated by the French Embassy: BAROQUE IN RIO. Although he primarily performs in solo recitals, Olivier Baumont has performed with many singers and instrumentalists, including Isabelle Druet, Jean-Paul Fouchécourt, Isabelle Poulenard, Julien Chauvin, Christophe Coin, Christine Plubeau, and Hugo Reyne. He equally enjoys performing duets for four hands, two harpsichords, with many friends like Béatrice Martin and Davitt Moroney, and also with young and brilliant colleagues like Aurélien Delage, Cristiano Gaudio, Jean-Luc Ho, and Justin Taylor. Visit http://www.olivierbaumont.fr for more information
Elaine Funaro • Saturday, April 28 at 1:00 pm
Harpsichordist Elaine Funaro is “regarded as one of the leading performers of new music for harpsichord” (Classical Music: The Essential Listening Companion). She is a popular presence at contemporary and early music festivals around the world, and was the first, now past, president of the newly merged Historical Keyboard Society of North America, and is currently the Artistic Director of Aliénor, the American-based international competition for new harpsichord music.
Ms. Funaro began her harpsichord studies at the Conservatorio Cherubini (Florence) with Annamaria Pernafelli. Following her graduation from Oberlin and the New England Conservatory, her advanced studies took her to the Amsterdam’s Sweelinck Conservatory. Her teachers have included Ton Koopman, John Gibbons, Lisa Crawford and the late Gustav Leonhardt.
Visit http://elainefunaromusic.com for more information
Janine Johnson • Saturday, April 27 at 4:00 pm
Janine Johnson performs on harpsichord and early piano, is a harpsichord builder and decorator, composer, and landscape artist. As a person with with such diverse interests, it has been a lifelong challenge to find outlets for her passions.
Ms. Johnson began her musical studies on the modern piano, and as a teenager, began playing the harpsichord as well. As a piano performance major (and two dimensional art) at California State University, Northridge, she focused on piano and harpsichord, performing on both. She began building harpsichords in earnest at this time (having made her first, at age 17), and has continued as an instrument maker ever since. For the past 26 years she has been working with renowned harpsichord builder and restorer John Phillips of Berkeley http://www.jph.us/ both as a maker and decorator.
Her performing career is primarily based in the San Francisco Bay Area where she gives numerous solo and chamber music recitals, often including original works. She composes solo and chamber music for the fortepiano and harpsichord, and was second place winner this year in the International Alienor Competition for harpsichord composition.
Jonathan Salamon • Saturday, April 27 at 2:30 pm
Jonathan (Jon) Salamon is a harpsichordist, pianist, and composer based in New York, NY. He has performed at festivals in the U.S. and abroad including the International Baroque Institute at Longy, Cambridge, MA, and at the Virtuoso & Bel Canto Festival in Lucca, Italy, among others. Jonathan has performed in masterclasses for artists such as Jordi Savall, Pierre Hantaï, Luca Guglielmi, Peter Sykes, and Ketil Haugsand. While in-residence at Yale, he played continuo for the Yale Baroque Opera Project, assisted in tuning at Yale’s Collection of Musical Instruments, and was a frequent collaborator on chamber music concerts.
Jonathan is currently the Principal Harpsichordist/Keyboardist with the Chamber Orchestra of New York, with whom he made his sold-out Carnegie Weill Hall debut in 2021 as soloist in Bach’s D-minor harpsichord concerto. A Fulbright Scholar, he studied and performed eighteenth-century music of Amsterdam’s Sephardic synagogue. In 2019, he was the Third Prizewinner at the 44th annual Mathieu Duguay Early Music Competition in Laméque, Canada.
Visit https://www.jonathansalamon.com for more information.
Arthur Haas • Friday, April 26 at 8:30 pm
Arthur Haas, widely known as a performer and teacher of Baroque music, studied harpsichord with Albert Fuller at Juilliard and Alan Curtis in Berkeley and Amsterdam, as well as receiving a master’s degree in Historical Musicology from the University of California, Los Angeles. Mr. Haas is Professor of Harpsichord, Early Music Performance and Continuo at Stony Brook University and teaches harpsichord at the Yale School of Music.
After receiving the top prize in the Paris International Harpsichord Competition in 1975, he continued to live in France until 1983, performing and teaching in many of the major European early music festivals.
Mr. Haas has toured with Marion Verbruggen, Jaap ter Linden, Julianne Baird, Wieland Kuijken and Bruce Haynes. He is a member of the Aulos Ensemble as well as Empire Viols and the newly formed Gold & Glitter, touring the USA and Canada. Annual summer workshop and festival appearances include the International Baroque Institute at Longy, the Virginia Baroque Performance Workshop and the Amherst Early Music Festival, where he served as artistic director of the Baroque Academy from 2002-2012.