ACRONYM (Baltimore Debut)
The Paul & Barbara Krieger Early Music Concert
Location: Shriver Hall
One hundred years before Mozart and Beethoven, Vienna’s music scene was already on fire with stylus phantasticus, a genre combining Italian drama and Northern European formal complexity. ACRONYM, an “outstanding young early-music string ensemble” (The New Yorker), presents a feast of musical delights in the band’s Baltimore debut. ACRONYM’s 11 members perform on strings, violas da gamba, theorbo, and keyboards, bringing “gutsy, fresh explorations” (Early Music America) to these rare treasures.
"The players revivify with throbbing, red-blooded immediacy, a spirit of spontaneous adventure, as if inventing anew on the spot." -The Boston Musical Intelligencer
About the sponsor
Paul and Barbara Krieger, great lovers and players of early music, endowed this concert in 2003. Paul, a retired pathologist, has turned to another great love: the study of music theory. Barbara was the executive director of the Vineyard Theater, an off-Broadway theater that she founded in 1981 that garnered two Pulitzer Prizes among many other honors. Currently, she is the artistic director of New York City's Children's Theater, a family theater and education company that she founded in 2001. The Kriegers have a collection of historical keyboard, wind, and string instruments, all of which they enjoy playing together with their many musical friends.
ACRONYM
Chloe Fedor, Johanna Novom, Adriane Post, Beth Wenstrom, violins
Kyle Miller, viola
Kivie Cahn-Lipman, viola da gamba & violoncello
Loren Ludwig, viola da gamba
Paul Dwyer, cello
Doug Balliett, violone
Daniel Swenberg, theorbo
Elliot Figg, harpsichord & organ
Baroque band ACRONYM — an "outstanding young early-music string ensemble" (The New Yorker)—is dedicated to giving modern premieres of the wild instrumental music of the seventeenth century. Playing with “…consummate style, grace, and unity of spirit” (The New York Times), the group formed in 2012 and has released ten critically acclaimed CDs since 2014. Recent projects include the first modern performances and recordings of works by Biber, Rosenmüller, Capricornus, and more. The band’s most recent album, Cantica Obsoleta (2020), features the modern premiere recordings of nearly-lost works from Sweden’s Düben Collection. The Boston Globe raves, “this musical time-capsule offers enough resplendence to transport anyone.”
Recent and upcoming engagements for ACRONYM include the Boston Early Music Festival, Festival Oude Muziek Utrecht (Netherlands), Music Before 1800 (NYC), Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (Boston), Naumburg Orchestral Concerts (NYC), Oberlin’s Artist Recital Series, Hamilton College Performing Arts Series (Clinton, NY), Baldwin Wallace Bach Festival (OH), Lincoln Friends of Chamber Music (NE), Arizona Early Music, Indianapolis Early Music Festival, Renaissance & Baroque (Pittsburgh), Chamber Music Wilmington (NC), Electric Earth Concerts (Peterborough, NH), and Five Boroughs Music Festival in New York City. ACRONYM has held academic residencies at Youngstown State University and Vassar College, and the group’s musicians can be heard in Tafelmusik, Les Arts Florissants, Apollo’s Fire, Handel and Haydn Society and the English Concert.
ACRONYM performs "with moving grace." -New York Classical Review
