Baroque Music Festival Corona del Mar

Gabriel Arregui graduated from Loma Linda University with a degree in organ performance and secondary emphasis on piano. He went on to earn his master’s degree in keyboard collaboration at the University of Southern California under Gwendolyn Koldofsky, Brooks Smith and Jean Barr, studying harpsichord with Malcolm Hamilton. Arregui won the Hans Schiff Memorial Chamber Music Scholarship, was awarded a graduate assistantship and the Departmental Award for Outstanding Graduate. Following graduate study, he returned to Loma Linda University to teach 18th-century counterpoint. Arregui is currently organist of the Roman Catholic Church of the Immaculata on the campus of the University of San Diego. Remaining active in coaching and recital work, he is regularly a featured soloist and chamber musician in our Baroque Music Festival, and has appeared in recitals with sopranos Julianne Bard and Rosa Lamoreaux.

Elizabeth Blumenstock is one of the country’s leading Baroque violinists. A frequent soloist, concertmaster, and leader with Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, American Bach Soloists, Chicago Opera Theater, and the Italian ensemble Il Complesso Barocco, she is also a member of several of California’s finest period-instrument ensembles, including Musica Pacifica, Trio Galatea, Trio Galanterie (with William Skeen), the Arcadian Academy, and American Baroque, which focuses not just on Baroque performance, but on the growing repertoire of new music written for old instruments. In 2004, Blumenstock was named Resident Artistic Director of the Los Angeles–based period-instrument orchestra Musica Angelica.

With over 80 recordings to her credit, she has recorded for Dorian, Harmonia Mundi, Virgin Classics, BMG, Reference Recordings, Koch International, Sony, New Albion, and others. She has appeared with period orchestras and chamber ensembles throughout the United States and abroad, and she has performed at the Boston and Berkeley Early Music Festivals, the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, Los Angeles Opera, the Carmel Bach Festival, and the San Luis Obispo Mozart Festival, among others. She is instructor of baroque violin at the University of Southern California and U.C. Berkeley, has taught at Oberlin’s Baroque Performance Institute and the International Baroque Institute at Longy. She is organist and choir director at Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in Richmond. Our Festival values her continuing performances in Corona del Mar.

Jolianne von Einem currently appears with the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, Magnificat, the California Bach Society, and the Portland Baroque Orchestra. She has traveled to Japan with the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra, to Singapore and Hong Kong with the American Bach Soloists, and has appeared in New York City, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany, England and France. Her recordings include the Mendelssohn Octet with Hausmusik on EMI, Eighteenth Century Music for Lute and Strings with Trio Galanterie on Audioquest, and Legrenzi cantatas and trio sonatas with El Mundo on Koch International.

A native of Los Angeles, she holds degrees from UCLA and the University of Southern California, where she studied modern violin with Alex Treger and Alice Schoenfeld. Baroque violin study with Monica Huggett led her to specialize in historical performance practice, and she became a founding member of the Los Angeles Baroque Orchestra. She performs regularly with fellow violinist Rob Diggins, and they are the proud parents of an 8-year-old daughter.

Clayton Haslop made his professional solo debut at age 20 under Sir Neville Marriner and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra touring the western United States. These highly acclaimed performances led to numerous engagements with orchestras and also resulted in his appointment, at Marriner’s recommendation, as founding violinist of the Los Angeles Piano Quartet. Having toured and recorded with this quartet for eight seasons, he left the ensemble in 1986 to focus more fully on an emerging partnership with guitarist Jack Sanders, resulting in two recordings (Centaur and Townhall labels), tours of North America and China, and numerous master class appearances.

Founding first violinist of the acclaimed New Hollywood String Quartet, Haslop has served as concertmaster for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, the Dallas Opera, the Santa Barbara Symphony, and the Los Angeles Opera. He was coached extensively by the legendary Nathan Milstein, studied under violinist Eudice Shapiro while a student at USC, and was a faculty member at Pomona College and Santa Monica college. He performs on a rare 1782 Storioni violin, and appears regularly in our Festival.

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Timothy Howard Organ/Harpsichord

Timothy Howard is Lecturer in Music at California State University, Northridge, where he teaches organ, harpsichord, music theory and music technology. He is founding Artistic Director of Opus Performing Arts, a professional arts group. He is the organist at the Pasadena Presbyterian Church and has held a number of elected positions in the American Guild of Organists, including Far West Regional Councillor and local chapter Dean. Howard holds the Doctor of Musical Arts degree with honors from the University of Southern California and is a member of Pi Kappa Lambda, the national music academic honor society.

For some fifteen years, Howard was Chorusmaster for the Los Angeles Music Theatre Company, preparing vocal ensembles for that company’s semi-annual opera productions; in 1998 he made his operatic conducting debut, leading singers and orchestra in Mozart’s Bastien und Bastienne and Der Schauspieldirektor. His work as composer, arranger, and collaborative performer can be heard on Christopher Parkening’s Simple Gifts (Angel Records), and he has several published compositions and arrangements to his credit.

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Timothy Landauer Violoncello

Timothy Landauer was hailed as “a cellist of extraordinary gifts” by the New York Times when won the coveted Concert Artists Guild International Award in 1983. He has won numerous prestigious prizes, among them the national Gregor Piatigorsky Memorial Cello Award of the Young Musicians Foundation, the Samuel Applebaum Grand Prize in the American String Teachers Association’s National Solo Competition, and the 1984 Hammer-Rostropovich Scholarship Award.

Landauer was born in Shanghai, the son of musicians. He first studied with his father and attended the Shanghai Conservatory Middle School. He continued his studies with Eleonore Schoenfeld at USC, where he earned his master’s degree and was immediately invited to join the faculty as a lecturer and assistant to Lynn Harrell. Since then his extensive engagements have included acclaimed recitals at Carnegie Recital Hall, the Ambassador Auditorium in Los Angeles, and the Orford Art Center in Montreal. He has performed as a soloist with the Russian Philharmonic Orchestra, Gulbenkian Orchestra (Lisbon), Hong Kong Philharmonic, Taiwan National Symphony, Beijing Symphony, Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, Maryland Symphony, Pacific Symphony Orchestra, and at the Grand Teton Festival. He was recipient of the “Outstanding Individual Artist Award” in 2004 by Arts Orange County.

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David Shostac Flute

David Shostac, principal flutist and a frequent soloist with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, has collaborated as a featured artist with conductors Sir Neville Marriner, Jean-Pierre Rampal, Iona Brown, Christopher Hogwood, Cristof Perick, Gerard Schwarz, Claudio Scimone, Karl Richter, Helmut Rilling, Jorge Mester, Henryk Szeryng, Jeffery Kahane, and many others. Solo appearances have included the Hollywood Bowl, Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival, the Casals Festival of Puerto Rico, the Aspen Music Festival, the Ojai Festival, the Stratford (Ontario) Festival, and the Carmel Bach Festival.

Shostac holds a master’s degree from Julliard, where he studied on a scholarship with Julius Baker. He has recorded on the Crystal, Angel, Nonesuch, Excelsior Records and Columbia labels, most recently J.S. Bach: The Six Flute Sonatas with harpsichordist Igor Kipnis and cellist John Walz. He played the flute solos on the 2006 Academy Awards show, heard by over one billion people, and will perform his own Carmen Fantasy for solo flute and orchestra at the National Flute Association Convention in Albuquerque this August. Formerly a faculty member at the University of Southern California and currently on the faculty of California State University Northridge, he is the author of Super Warm-ups for the Flute.

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William Skeen Violoncello

William Skeen resides in the Bay Area, where he is principal cellist with the American Bach Soloists and a member of Philharmonia Baroque and the Stockton Symphony. Formerly on the faculty of the University of San Diego, since 2001 he has been with the Early Music Department of the University of Southern California, teaching cello. This year, he will spend his sixth summer at the Carmel Bach Festival as cellist and viola da gamba soloist.

Skeen is cofounder and director of La Monica, a period-instrument sextet devoted to Italian and German repertoire of the 17th century — a youthful group that has been received with great acclaim at many of the country’s top early-music series, including Pittsburgh’s Renaissance and Baroque Society, and New York City’s Music Before 1800. He has served as principal cellist with Seattle Baroque, the Los Angeles Baroque Orchestra, Musica Angelica, the San Diego Opera, and the Chicago Opera Theater. He is a member of El Mundo, Trio Galanterie (with Elizabeth Blumenstock and John Schneiderman), and Just Strings, a new-music ensemble exploring microtonal repertoire. We welcome his return to our Festival.

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John Thiessen Trumpet

John Thiessen appears as soloist and principal trumpet with early music ensembles throughout the U.S. and Canada, including Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, Tafelmusik, American Bach Soloists, Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra and Washington Bach Consort, and has performed with the Academy of Ancient Music, Taverner Players, English Baroque Soloists and the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra.

Thiessen graduated with high distinction in trumpet performance from the Eastman School of Music. He holds a Master of Historical Musicology degree from King’s College, University of London, and is the recipient of grants from the Canada Council and Ontario Arts Council for baroque trumpet studies in the UK. He serves on the faculties of the Baroque Performance Institute at Oberlin College and the International Baroque Institute at Longy in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has recorded extensively for Sony Classical Vivarte, Telarc, EMI, BMG, Deutsche Harmonia Mundi, London/Decca, Analekta, CBC, and Denon.

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