Since then he has continued his studies of the harpsichord, clavichord and baroque organ by participating in masterclasses and workshops given by many of the worlds leading early keyboard performers: Bob Van Asperen, Menno Van Delft, Peter Van Dijk, Jesper Christensen, Christoph Hammer, Ketil Haugsand, Gustav Leonhardt, Zvi Meniker, Davitt Moroney, Jurgen Schrape, Ella Sevskaya, Skip Sempé and Christopher Stembridge. Stanislav approaches music from XVI to XX centuries through historical styles of interpretation and pays attention in choosing proper kinds of instruments and tunings. He has a particular interest in early Italian music.

He devotes his time mainly to his activity as a soloist and as a member of various ensembles: The Pocket Symphony, Moscow Baroque, BaRockers, Pfeyffer, Hermitage, performing baroque music in Moscow, Saint Petersburg and in Novosibirsk. He also teaches the harpsichord in the Gnessin Special Music School and Rubinstein Music School.

In 2006 his ensemble BaRockers performed at Utrecht Early Music Festival. In 2010 he was awarded the third prize in the international harpsichord competition “Musica Antiqua” in Brugge and the Baerenreiter Urtext Prize in the Bach competition in Leipzig.

Harpsichordist and conductor Korneel Bernolet (°1989) has been active on the European concert scene from the age of nineteen, playing with renowned ensembles such as La Petite Bande (Sigiswald Kuijken), Scherzi Musicali (Nicolas Achten), B’Rock and cantoLX (Frank Agsteribbe), the Mannheimer Hofkapelle (Florian Heyerick) and his own Ensemble Apotheosis. His reputation as recital soloist is growing. Korneel graduated from the Royal Antwerp Conservatory with the highest honours as a student of Ewald Demeyere, and subsequently took part in master-classes with Christophe Rousset, Gustav Leonhardt and Jesper Bøje Christensen. He teaches at Artesis University College Antwerp and the Aalst music school.

As a promising young conductor he was musical director of many a concert in Belgium and the Netherlands as well as opera and ballet performances. He worked as assistant-conductor and conductor at the Royal Antwerp Conservatory, B’Rock and the Netherlands Wind Ensemble. At the age of eighteen, Korneel was admitted to the highest level of the international Kurt Thomas Course for conductors in Utrecht; since then he has been coached by Geert Hendrix and Luc Anthonis.

Korneel played in countless cd, radio and tv recordings with renowned ensembles. Among the many prizes award to Korneel are the ‘Belfius Classics Award’ 2008 and the ‘ARTos Music Prize’ 2012 for particular artistic merit. He is ‘Laureate 2013’ of SWUK-Flanders, where he is also artist in residence. In april 2013, his first solo cd will be released on Aliud Records, featuring works by Balbastre. [www.korneel.bernolet.com)

As a solo performer, Sempé has focused on developing a superb sense of idiomatic harpsichord touch and a finely tuned ear for achieving variation in the instrument’s sonority. Performing and recording on the world’s most prestigious harpsichords, made by Ruckers, Skowroneck, Kennedy and Sidey, Skip Sempé is particularly known for his interpretations of the French classical harpsichord literature including Chambonnières, d’Anglebert, Forqueray, Louis and François Couperin and Rameau, for his adventurous and ground-breaking Bach and Scarlatti, and for the earlier virginalist repertoire of Byrd and his contemporaries.

For 2006/07, Skip Sempé was named Artist-in-Residence for BOZAR Music in Brussels, with a ‘carte blanche’ of five concert appearances, in recital, with Capriccio Stravagante, the Capriccio Stravagante Renaissance Orchestra, the Collegium Vocale Gent and B’Rock – and including a special event of Masterclasses and Lectures for the Orpheus Instutite in Ghent in the ‘Artistic Witness’ series.

Following fifteen years of prizes and awards with three prestigious labels, Skip Sempé founded the Paradizo label in 2006. The label will release all of Capriccio Stravagante and Skip Sempe’s new recordings, assuring Capriccio Stravagante’s own tradition of presenting important new instrumental and vocal soloists. In founding the Paradizo label, Skip Sempé adds the role of impresario to his ever-growing list of activities as harpsichordist, musical director of Capriccio Stravagante, guest musical director, coach, teacher and lecturer.

Pieter has always been at home on the modern cello with metal and/or gut strings as he is on the baroque 4 string and 5 string cello. Therefore he covers a repertoire from JS Bach to Elliott Carter drawing on a palett of sounds and colours available from his range of instruments, string set-ups and bows. Having grown up in an age and country where hearing period instruments was very much the norm for concert-goers, Pieter naturally developed his conviction that, in the right conditions, much 18th and 19th century music sounds far better on gut strings than on metal. However he is not a purist in the sense that if conditions are less than ideal (no fortepiano, too big a hall, too hot, too humid, too dry acoustically etc.) then he is more than happy to pick up his modern cello with metal strings (which therefor is quite often the case).

Recitals have always played a major part in Pieter’s concert diary. As a recitalist with piano, he has all the main repertoire at his disposal which is always ready for performance, often at very short notice. He is not, and has never been, the type of soloist who tours the world with one or two recital programmes and a couple of concertos per season. On the contrary, a typical week in Pieter’s life (if one can be said to exist) could well include the Bach suites, with perhaps 2 different recital programmes, a couple of concerto appearances with a student masterclass thrown in for good measure! He has appeared as recitalist all over the world including the Concertgebouw (Amsterdam), Wigmore Hall (London), Chatelet (Paris), Teatro Colon (Buenos Aires) and Sydney Opera House. Future exciting engagements include Bach and Britten suites at the Lincoln Centre, New York and a return visit to the Edinburgh Festival.

Pieter has appeared with a variety of orchestras and ensembles both with and without conductors. Notable projects without conductors have been the touring and recording of the Schumann and Shostakovich cello concertos with the Australian Chamber Orchestra. This orchestra has, without doubt, provided for Pieter the happiest and most satisfying musical collaborations of his career to date, not least due to the genius of leader and musical director, Richard Tognetti. He has also appeared, with conductor, with the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, the BBC symphony orchestra, the Russian National Symphony, Camerata Academica Salzburg, Mahler Chamber Orchestra and the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen to name but a few and has recorded with the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra and the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic. Future engagements with orchestras include the Halle, the Japan Philharmonic, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra under Herbert Blomstedt and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment under Marc Minkowsky.

Pieter considers himself extremely lucky that, despite the demise of the classical recording industry, he is in a position, thanks to the support of his record label Channel Classics, to be able to record his own choice of repertoire with his own choice of artists and orchestras. This freedom has resulted in the conception of CD’s with unusually imaginative repertoire such as Schubert violin sonatinas, Chopin Waltzes, Mazurkas and Preludes and the Bach Gamba sonatas with his own personal intrumentations. All titles that major labels would undoubtedly have shied away from. The latter would also be true for his 2nd Bach suites recording, the decision to record Schumann and Shostakovich cello concerti without conductor and his recent plan to re-record the Brahms and Beethoven sonatas. But maybe what he appreciates most about Channel Classics is the fact that he is allowed complete hands-on control over the producing and, more importantly, the editing and post production processes, his involvement even stretching to writing texts for the CD booklets.

During the last decade he has been regarded as one of the leading cello soloists. Interestingly enough, when in his twenties Pieter was both considered an enfant terrible and stigmatized as a baroque cellist by some. His image as enfant terrible might have been caused by the fact that Pieter never opted for the mainstream career approach, including “useful” teachers and competitions. He chose to stay loyal to the small label Channel Classics and couldn’t help being quite outspoken in interviews. In his first two years as recording artist, when he did the complete Bach and Beethoven on period instruments, he made sure, to avoid the development of the wrong image, that he also recorded the complete Britten suites and the Kodaly sonata. Although the Britten got a great reception it was to no immediate avail. At first he used to regret his baroque stigma, but later he had to admit that the Bach suites had sent him all over the world.

Crucial for the broadening of his reputation was that, from the mid-nineties onwards, Channel Classics was able to organise the recording of the main concerto repertoire. For the near future everything is set to record remaining “biggies”, like the 2nd Shostakovich, the Prokofiev, Dutilleux, Britten and Walton.

Skip Sempé, virtuoso harpsichordist and founder of Capriccio Stravagante, is at the forefront of today’s musical personalities in Renaissance and Baroque music. Sempé grew up in New Orleans, studied music, musicology, organology and the history of art in the United States at the Oberlin Conservatory and completed his training in Europe with Gustav Leonhardt in Amsterdam. His distinctive harpsichord playing, musicianship and interpretive flair were quickly noticed by Reinhard Goebel and William Christie, who encouraged him to remain in Europe and embark on his own pioneering reconsideration of well and lesser-known repertoire ranging from 1500 – 1750.

Capriccio Stravagante now incorporates the chamber ensemble, the Capriccio Stravagante Orchestra, the Capriccio Stravagante Renaissance Orchestra and Capriccio Stravagante Opera. The diverse vocal and instrumental formations of Capriccio Stravagante feature the finest European, American and Canadian musicians. The combination of nonchalance and power which are the trademarks of Skip Sempé and Capriccio Stravagante’s performances have been rewarded with outstanding critical praise worldwide.

As a solo performer, Sempé has focused on developing a superb sense of idiomatic harpsichord touch and a finely tuned ear for achieving variation in the instrument’s sonority. Performing and recording on the world’s most prestigious harpsichords, made by Ruckers, Skowroneck, Kennedy and Sidey, Skip Sempé is particularly known for his interpretations of the French classical harpsichord literature including Chambonnieres, d’Anglebert, Forqueray, Louis and Francois Couperin and Rameau, for his adventurous and ground-breaking Bach and Scarlatti, and for the earlier virginalist repertoire of Byrd and his contemporaries. Solo performances from Seattle to Tokyo – including La Roque d’Antheron, dedication concerts for the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Chateau de Versailles – as well as masterclasses for the Leipzig Bach Festival, the Berkeley Early Music Festival, Mc Gill University and the University of Montreal have attracted a particularly enthusiastic following. Recent prizewinning recordings include “Pavana – The Virgin Harpsichord”, featuring Elizabethan music for one, two and three harpsichords with his colleagues Olivier Fortin and Pierre Hantai.

Skip Sempé combines the rare synthesis of uncompromising musical moderator and admired virtuoso performer. He is in constant demand as a recording artist, having succeded Gustav Leonhardt for the Deutsche Harmonia Mundi label and Jordi Savall for Astree. As a solo harpsichordist or as a basso continuo player of infinite finesse with Capriccio Stravagante, Skip Sempé has assured the ongoing traditions of those pioneers and vast repertoires with more than two dozen prizewinning recordings. They document Skip Sempé’s dedication to strategic planning of repertoire, artist and programming, as well as featuring new and important collaborators such as Guillemette Laurens, Maria Bayo, Jay Bernfeld, Mike Fentross, Manfredo Kraemer, Olivier Fortin, Julien Martin, Josh Cheatham, Chanticleer and the Studio de Musique Ancienne de Montreal. With special regard for his recording techniques, in production as well as post-production, The New Grove has written that Sempé strives “to transfer the spontaneity of a live performance to the recorded medium”.

Among the distinctions Skip Sempé has received for his recordings are the Diapason d’ Or de l’année, the Choc du Monde de la Musique de l’année, Grand Prix du Disque de l’ Academie du Disque Francais, Gramophone Critic’s Choice, Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik, Goldberg 5 Stars, Telerama ffff, Opera International 4 croches, Stereo Review Best of the Month, Penguin Guide Yearbook Award, Top 10 Classics USA, Gramophone Editor’s Choice, 10 de Repertoire, 10 de Classica, CD Classica Scelte d’ Editore, and a Grammy Award Nomination for the debut recording of the Capriccio Stravagante Orchestra.

“Sempé, a performer with deep feeling for Baroque style and practice, puts his stamp on everything he does. This is simply some of the most exciting old-music performance around.”

Olivier Fortin

Olivier Fortin graduated with distinction from the Québec Conservatory in 1995 in the class of Anatole Gagnon. He continued his training with Dom André Laberge, obtained a Master Degree from University of Montreal under the direction of Réjean Poirier, and received several scholarships for studies in Paris with Pierre Hantai and in Amsterdam with Bob van Asperen. In 1997 he was awarded top prizes at the Montreal Bach Competition and the Bruges Festival, and received the Capriccio Stravagante Prize in 1998.

He is increasingly in demand as a soloist and chamber musician, touring and recording throughout Europe, China and South Korea, the United States and Canada with Masques, Capriccio Stravagante, Tafelmusik, Opera Quarta, Chanticleer, the Studio de Musique Ancienne de Montréal and Les Voix Humaines. He also performs with Skip Sempé and Pierre Hantaï in programs of music for two and three harpsichords.

Olivier Fortin has appeared in the Festivals of Berkeley, La Roque d’Antheron, Utrecht, Aldeburgh, Regensburg, Zermatt, Montreal Baroque; Music Before 1800 and the Frick Collection in New York, the Cite de Musique in Paris, the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles, BOZAR Music in Brussels, the Folle Journée in Nantes, Bilbao and Lisbon and the Festival Bach de Lausanne. As both solo harpsichordist and featured collaborative artist, he has recorded more than twenty CDs for Analekta, Atma, Paradizo, Alpha and Teldec.

Olivier Fortin is the founder and director of the Montreal-based ensemble Masques. Since 1998, the ensemble has become a strategic meeting point for young Canadian musicians. From 2004-2008 he taught harpsichord and chamber music at the Conservatoire de Musique de Quebec, and he currently teaches at the Tafelmusik Summer Institute in Toronto.

As a performer on the baroque guitar and a dancer he has worked with the finest musicians and ensembles in the early music field, performing and recording regularly.

He has appeared, choreographed and taught for tv, theatre, opera, school and the layman, from the northern coast of Norway to the southern tip of Australia.

He was born in Maastricht (the Netherlands) and studied harpsichord in the city of his birth with Anneke Uittenbosch. In 1970 he went to study with Gustav Leonhardt at the Amsterdam Conservatory from which he graduated in 1974.

Jacques Ogg’s current activities include soloconcerts on harpsichord or on fortepiano, concerts with flautist Wilbert Hazelzet as a duo as well as a trio-formation with Jaap ter Linden. He has been a member of the Orchestra of the 18th Century and has performed regularly with Concerto Palatino. He is frequently invited for masterclasses, for instance in Curitiba (Brazil), Vancouver (Canada), Buenos Aires (Argentina), in Mateus (Portugal), Salamanca (Spain) as well as in Cracow (Poland), Prague and Budapest. He was invited as a juror in competitions such as “Bach Wettbewerb” (Leipzig), “Prague Spring” and “Jurow Competition (USA).

Jacques Ogg is artistic director of the Lyra Baroque Orchestra in Minneapolis/Saint Paul (Minnesota, VS).

The concerto has its roots in stile concertato style that originates from the late Renaissance polychoral style of for instance Andrea Gabrieli in the Basilica of St.Mark where ensembles of singers and musicians were situated in different parts of the church, took turns and thus “competed” against each other. The birth of the instrumental concerto in late 17th century Italy followed two parallel main lines: namely the Roman and the Venetian one. The main difference between the two was that the Roman concerto was developed from the trio sonata tradition (three parts) and the Venetian was developed from the solo part that was accompanied and contrasted by an ensemble of two violin parts, a viola part and a bass part (five parts). With respect to the Roman concerto, the basic point to keep in mind is that the three basic parts are played by different instrumental combinations and the tone colour, weight and volume changes are effected through variety in instrumentation – as in the Venetian one the point is more the one of a heroic soloist fighting against the mass of the orchestra, both through playing simultaneously and through the alteration of solo and ritornello passages. The Venetian concerto has lived until our days, transforming itself from the Vivaldi concerti to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms and numerous other well known examples all the way until contemporary compositions.

Arcangelo Corelli has been attributed to having “invented” the Roman concerto grosso form. Whether or not it was exactly him can be traced to the late 1670s when this new type of composing music evolved. During those times and until the early 1700s Rome was a flourishing centre of European music culture where people from the whole continent gathered to study and work. Corelli’s students and colleagues of fame included Francesco Geminiani and Georg Friedrich Händel, who had Corelli leading the violin section in performances of his oratorio La Resurrezione in 1708. One of the first published works in the new style was the sonata collection Armonico Tributo by Georg Muffat in 1682, written when he had already left Rome to work in Salzburg. Corelli’s own Concerti Grossi, Op. 6 weren’t published until 1714, a few years after the composer’s death. Händel’s concerti grossi weren’t composed during his stay in Italy, but during a longer period of time from circa 1710 until the 1740s. An interesting link between the Montisi Festival and the birth of the instrumental concerto is the 1658 de Zentis harpsichord that is situated in Montisi nowadays. It might have been commissioned by the abdicated queen Christina of Sweden, who turned Catholic (a strong point made by the daughter of the great defender of the Lutheran faith, the warrior king Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden) and lived the rest of her life in Rome. She was a great lover of arts in general and is known to have been a financial and artistic supporter of Corelli.

The great Johann Sebastian Bach never stuck to one stylistic idiom in his composing. This is the case also when it comes to the concerto, he was at home with both the Roman and the Venetian concerto form. The Brandenburg concertos can be seen as developments from the concerto grosso form, the rest of his concerti are in the Vivaldian style, in which there is more clearly a soloist versus an orchestra. All the Bach concerti for one or more harpsichords BWV 1052-1065, date from 1730s and are most probably adaptations from earlier concerti from his time in Cöthen except for BWV 1057 which is a version of the fourth Brandenburg concerto and the concerto for four harpsichords which is a version of the Vivaldi concerto for four violins RV 580. Most of the concerti have only the harpsichord version surviving, only three single harpsichord concerti and the BWV 1060 double harpsichord concerto that are adaptations from Bach’s own violin concerti have their originals preserved to our time. None of them were published in Bach’s time and it was only in the mid 1800′s that the Bach-Gesellschaft and the Kistner house (among other publishers) started issuing commercial editions of them.

The concerto for harpsichord BWV 1052 in D minor is perhaps the most known of all the Bach keyboard concerti, made famous when Glenn Gould recorded it with Leonard Bernstein in 1957 following the huge artistic and commercial success of his debut recording of the Goldberg variations in 1955. It has its presumed roots in a lost violin concerto, but it also has material from Cantatas BWV 146 and 188 that have survived. It is virtuosic compared to many Bach concerti and still retains a great deal of violin textures also in its keyboard form. The solo harpsichord has only one single silence in the whole piece (just before the small free cadenza-like section in the first movement) and especially the third movement has an exhausting perpetuum mobile -feeling to it. The concerto for three harpsichords BWV 1064 is thought to be a transcription of a lost concerto for three violins, it is texturally speaking very busy and the solo parts are almost equal when it comes to the amount of soloistic material. There have been several attempts to reconstruct the original violin concerto and many of them have also been recorded.

Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach, the son of Johann Sebastian, took the concerto form to even greater heights with some 40-odd essays in that form (for flute, cello, and oboe in addition to numerous concerti for keyboard instruments). His d-minor concerto for the harpsichord (Wq. 23) dates from 1748, when he was serving as court harpsichordist to Frederick the Great in Potsdam and was at the vanguard of the most cutting-edge trends in German composition. Virtuosic and characterised by great contrasts between various moods and sentiments, this greatly passionate concerto could only be written by someone who was as well-trained in performance and composition as C.P.E. Bach would have been. While it differs in flavour from the staunchly Baroque works of his father, in terms of compositional perfection and a strong Rhetorical sense it is first and foremost a work of the ‘Bach school.’ In contrasts to Sebastian Bach’s harpsichord concerti, C.P.E. Bach’s harpsichord concerti take advantage of mid-eighteenth century advances in harpsichord building, particularly with respect to the use of a wider compass. Most importantly, Wq. 23 strays perhaps the farthest from the Venetian model — here, the soloist is really posed ‘against’ the orchestra rather than emanating from it, resulting in a dramatically heightened sense of musical reality.

Matias Häkkinen & Mahan Esfahani 2011