1820: Flute, Viola and Guitar

The Salish Sea Early Music Festival presents guitarist Oleg Timofeyev, flutist Jeffrey Cohan and violist Steve Creswell in 1820: Flute, Viola and Guitar, a rare program of great chamber music from the time of Beethoven and Schubert on period instruments on Thursday, April 19 at 7:30 PM at Vashon United Methodist Church at 17928 Vashon Highway SW on Vashon Island.

The suggested donation, a free will offering towards expenses, will be $15 or $20. Youth 18 and under and students are free. For further information the public is requested to call Vashon United Methodist Church at (206) 463-9804. Please see www.concertspirituel.org for further information about this and other Salish Sea Early Music Festival performances around the Puget Sound.

During the early 19th century flute, guitar and viola formed an extremely popular ensemble, for which numerous composers, among them virtuoso flutists and guitarists, wrote much great chamber music. The Notturno Opus 21 by Wenzeslaus Thomas Matiegka was thought for many years to have originated from the pen of Franz Schubert, and will be performed along with selections by Francesco Molino, Antonio Diabelli and Joseph Küffner.

Jeffrey Cohan will play an 8-keyed flute made in London in 1820, the classical flute of Beethoven’s time which is more frequently heard today as the preferred instrument of Irish folk flutists. The Russian 7-string guitar played by Oleg Timofeyev acquired a seventh string in Czechoslovakia in Mozart’s day, was the only guitar in Russia for all European chamber music in the 19th century, and is the guitar of choice among the Russian gypsies and some classical musicians in Russia. Violists in Beethoven’s day used a different bow and playing techniques in which Steve Creswell specializes.

~ UPCOMING at Vashon United Methodist Church ~

MAY 17

• On Thursday, May 17 at 7:30 PM, An Evening with Wilhelmine will feature baroque lutenist John Schneiderman from Los Angeles, baroque cellist William Skeen from San Francisco and baroque flutist Jeffrey Cohan.

Frederick the Great’s sister Wilhelmine in Bayreuth employed Adam Falckenhagen, who wrote exquisite trios for flute, baroque lute and cello entitled Concerti, which will be featured in this program. Wilhelmine played lute and her husband was a flutist, as was Wilhelmine’s brother Frederick II, King of Prussia.

About the performers:

OLEG TIMOFEYEV plays the renaissance, 10-course, and baroque lutes, 19th-century guitar, viola da gamba and recorder, and is one of the world’s foremost authorities on the Russian seven-string guitar. He was an Artist in Residence for the School of Music at the University of Iowa, and Visiting Assistant Professor for the Department of Russian. He also has taught at Grinnell College and Cornell College. Mr. Timofeyev has a Ph. D. in Performance Practice from Duke University and has received many fellowships, grants and awards, including two separate Fulbright grants for recent research into the Russian guitar in Moscow and for teaching early plucked instruments in Ukraine. His editions have been published by A-R Editions, and his articles have appeared in periodicals including the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and in the Lute Society Quarterly. In Moscow he founded and directed the still active early music group Pratum Musicum for the Moscow Palace of Culture. He is guest lecturer and performer with the annual Vanamuusika Päevad, an Estonian early music festival, and directs the annual International Russian Guitar Festival and the International Academy for Russian Music, Arts, and Culture, both in Iowa City, Iowa. He has made many solo recordings for Dorian Recordings.

Violist STEVE CRESWELL performs on historical instruments with Pacific Baroque Orchestra, the Seattle Baroque Orchestra and Early Music Vancouver. He has recorded and toured internationally with Tafelmusik of Toronto, and REBEL from New York. On modern instruments, he has worked with dance companies, new music ensembles, and unusual string collectives–most recently, SCRAPE! the brainchild of Cornish School for the Arts professor, Jim Knapp. He also a member of Northwest Sinfonietta, a modern chamber orchestra hailing from Tacoma, Washington, and has played in the Whidbey Island Music Festival. Stephen performs frequently as concertmaster of Seattle Choral Company, and teaches at the Academy of Music Northwest in Bellevue, WA. In November, 2010, he jointly launched a new classical string ensemble in Seattle: the Kügeln Trio, with colleagues Nathan Whittaker and Laurel Wells.

Flutist JEFFREY COHAN has performed as soloist in 25 countries, having received international acclaim both as a modern flutist and as one of very few who specialists on all transverse flutes from the Renaissance through the present. He won both the Erwin Bodky Award in Boston, and the highest prize awarded in the Flanders Festival International Concours Musica Antiqua in Brugge, Belgium. First Prize winner of the Olga Koussevitzky Young Artist Awards Competition, he has performed throughout Europe, Australia, New Zealand and the United States, and worldwide for the USIA Arts America Program. He received the highest rating from the Music Panel of the National Endowment for the Arts, and has recorded for NPR in the United States, and for national radio and television in Germany, Switzerland, France, Belgium, Holland, Fiji and the Solomon Islands. Many works have been written for and premiered by him, including five new flute concerti since 2000. He is artistic director of the Capitol Hill Chamber Music Festival in Washington, DC and the Salish Sea Early Music Festival. He can "play many superstar flutists one might name under the table" according to the New York Times, and is "The Flute Master" according to the Boston Globe.

• The Salish Sea Early Music Festival presents period instrument performances of chamber music on Vashon Island and around the Puget Sound, featuring some of the finest period instrument performers from the Northwest and the USA, Canada and Germany along with artistic director Jeffrey Cohan. Chamber music by familiar and little-known composers from the Renaissance through the present is heard in period instrument performances which shed new light upon early performance practice. Unpublished works from the Library of Congress and other libraries and rarely heard instruments and instrumental combinations that were familiar in earlier times are given particular attention.