News

"Exciting music - brilliantly played"

We are pleased to announce that the first Summer Academy for 17th-century Music, held in cooperation with Festival Oudemuziek, Utrecht, will take place from 22nd - 27th August 2011 at the Music Conservatoire in Utrecht. Teachers for the course will be Kathryn Cok - harpsichord and continuo, Bruce Dickey - cornetto, Bjarte Eike - baroque violin, Wouter Verschuren - dulcian and Adam Woolf - baroque trombone (sackbut). The course will feature large and small ensemble playing - although focussing on the smaller repertoire, with which the Caecilia-Concert is associated. There will also be specialist classes in ornamentation, playing at different performance pitches, reed-making and other subjects specific to the instruments present.

2012 will see the Caecilia-Concert's USA debut with performances in New York and other East Coast venues. Later in the summer of 2012, we will be returning to Ton Koopman's Itineraire Baroque festival in France. 2012 will also see the release of our next CD.

The aspirations of the Caecilia-Concert are to produce historically informed, exciting and innovative performances and all members are involved in academically based research as a way of achieving this. Much of the music performed by us is either virtually unknown or rarely performed and has been obtained from various libraries including the Uppsala University Library, Sweden, The City Libraries of Berlin, and The British Library, London. Programmes are put together based on historical events or influences and performance practice as it might have been at the time of composition reflect our interpretation. This said, using our knowledge about the instruments we know to have been available to the composers we perform and the specific way they were written for, we can also make justifiable substitutions when considering programmes and works and this allows us to present pieces that otherwise may not get performed. We are in the process of making modern performing editions of many works although often the original parts are clear enough to use in performance.