With pop-star flair, violinist Aisslinn Nosky has shown vitality across her career. For her latest high-profile project, a complete Mozart violin concerto cycle, she traveled through rarely performed Haydn—an unusual journey for most violinists, but in perfect keeping with the H&H approach.
The versatility of Nashville’s historically informed musicians has made them flexible, even delightfully heretical, in their approach to performing early music. It’s a scene that has been ebbing, flowing, and growing for nearly 20 years.
Like playing bingo, you can find “crisp” in countless early-music reviews, although such a term isn’t found in the historical record. Are musicians looking for uniformly “crisp” playing while neglecting other sonic possibilities? What’s going on here?
The countertenor’s commitment to early music remains solid, even as the larger entertainment world has discovered his unique talents. You sense that Holiday’s intense desire to communicate informs his cabaret act as much as his Baroque opera.
If you’ve ever sung or played a madrigal from an edition on IMSLP, you’ve probably engaged with the work of Allen Garvin, whose International Music Score Library Project corpus surpassed two thousand uploads last year. A computer programmer and mobility systems engineer by profession, Garvin is undaunted by the technical aspect of typesetting editions. “The music I really love is the madrigal repertoire from about 1550-1590. I return to those over and over again.”
In February, William Christie came to New York as part of his annual residency with the Juilliard School’s Historical Performance program. He noticed a sea change in attitude on the American scene toward the study of historically informed practice.
James Nicolson, the 2013 recipient of EMA’s Howard Mayer Brown Award for lifetime achievement in the field of early music, was interviewed in March 2021 by Leslie Kwan.
