SAXTONS RIVER, Vt. – Main Streets Arts ushers in the holiday season with a benefit concert by Cameo Baroque Saturday, Dec. 1 at 7:30 p.m.
With a theme of Wintertide, the four-piece group will offer music by English, Italian and German composers such as William Boyce, Antonio Caldara, Georg Philipp Telemann, George Frideric Handel and Tommaso Albinoni.
Members of the quartet performing on period instruments are Beth Hilgartner, recorder and voice, Leslie Stroud, traverso (Baroque flute), Ernie Drown, harpsichord, and Laurie Rabut, viola da gamba.
Cameo Baroque is known for performances of interesting transcriptions by Hilgartner of works originally written for voices of other instrumentation. As an example, the Caldara pieces to be performed in the concert are instrumental transcriptions of arias from his opera Apollo in Cielo.
Hilgartner studied recorder with Eric Haas in Boston after an early start in piano and oboe. She works as a recorder maker at the Prescott Workshop in addition to her vocation as an Episcopal priest and her avocations of writer, gardener, equestrian and knitter.
Drown grew up in central Vermont and has been the music director at the Church of Christ at Dartmouth since 1999. He studied organ with Lenora McCroskey and John Ferris and harpsichord with John Gibbons. He teaches piano and organ privately and collects and repairs antique fountain pens when not at the piano bench.
Stroud is a California native who graduated from the Peabody Conservatory of Music. She is an orchestral and chamber musician who says she is “dedicated to bringing audiences music ranging from that of the 18th and 19th centuries played on historic period flutes to adventurous works by composers of our own time on modern-day flutes.”
She has performed widely throughout New England and beyond and is a founding member of Cameo Baroque. She has taught extensively and maintains a private studio in the Upper Valley.
Newest member of Cameo Baroque is Laurie Rabut, a recent newcomer to Rockingham. She received her formal music training and degree from the Boston University School of Fine and Applied Arts and did further study, including baroque violin and viol, at the Baroque Performance Institute at Oberlin and at Cornell.
She has performed with The Greenwood Consort, Parthenia, The Boston Camerata, Boston Baroque, Apollo Ensemble and The Arcadia Players and currently performs with a variety of ensembles in the New York and New England region. She has taught for Amherst Early Music, Pinewoods and the Viola da Gamba Society and teaches in the Five College Early Music Program in Western Massachusetts.
Following the concert, there will be a reception with the musicians. Refreshments, non-alcoholic beverages and a BYO table with ice for adult beverages will be provided.
Tickets for the concert are $20 and may be purchased on line at www.mainstreetarts.org or by contacting MSA at (802) 869-2960.
