Two performances:

To purchase tickets in advance or for information, call 781.466.6694 or visit www.oldpostroad.org

 

Vocal and instrumental fireworks will abound at Musicians of the Old Post Road’s season opening concert performances. Roman Handel will treat audiences to some of George Frideric Handel’s most fiery and lyrical works, composed while he studied and worked in Italy. The program will also showcase Italian contemporaries of Handel, including Lulier, Bononcini, Corelli, and Gasparini. Soprano Kristen Watson, an Old Post Road audience favorite, will join the ensemble for this delightful program, which will include a regional premiere of the cantata Amor di che tu vuoi by Giovanni Lulier. Performances will take place on Friday, October 22, 8 p.m. at First Parish Church, 327 Concord Road in Sudbury; and on Saturday October 23, 8 p.m. at Emmanuel Church, 15 Newbury Street in Boston. Performers include Suzanne Stumpf, traverso, Sarah Darling and Jesse Irons, violins, Daniel Ryan, cello, and Michael Bahmann, harpsichord, with guest soprano, Kristen Watson.

Daniel Ryan and Suzanne Stumpf, Artistic Directors of the award-winning ensemble Musicians of the Old Post Road, are pleased to announce these opening performances of the ensemble’s 2010-2011 season of chamber music concerts. The ensemble’s unique concert series brings period instrument performances of music of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries to beautiful historic buildings along the path of New England’s fabled Old Post Road. The group’s programming offers a fascinating mix of newly-rediscovered works alongside established masterpieces. For this twenty-second season, concerts will be presented at venues in Boston, Cambridge, Wayland, Sudbury, and Worcester. Children will be offered free admission when accompanied by an adult at all venues.

 

Tickets are $25 general admission, $20 for seniors and students. Children ages 7 to 17 are admitted free when accompanied by an adult. Old Post Road concert sites are wheelchair accessible. For tickets and additional information, contact Musicians of the Old Post Road, 318 Bear Hill Road, Suite 9, Waltham, MA 02451, telephone (781) 466-6694, or visit OPR’s website at www.oldpostroad.org. Musicians of the Old Post Road concert series is sponsored, in part, by The Furumoto Research Foundation, The Bear Foundation, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

Musicians of the Old Post Road is a chamber music ensemble specializing in the period instrument performance of music from the Baroque, Classical, and early Romantic periods. The ensemble has received national recognition for its creative programming, garnering the Noah Greenberg Award from the American Musicological Society, and awards from Chamber Music America and the U.S.–Mexico Fund for Culture. The group has appeared on New England's WCVB-TV’s “Chronicle” program and toured throughout Europe and the United States, including performances at the Tage Alter Musik Festival in Regensburg, Germany, the Boston Early Music Festival concert series, and the Indianapolis Early Music Festival. The ensemble was in residence at Dartmouth College in April, 2005. 

 

The ensemble’s acclaimed concert series, founded in 1989, brings chamber music performances to venues in cities and towns along the original route of the old Boston Post Road, the first thoroughfare connecting Boston and New York City beginning in the late seventeenth century. Sites for the concert series have included historic meetinghouses, mansions, museums, and public halls offering the architecture, acoustics, and ambiance appropriate to the music.

The group’s discography includes five critically acclaimed recordings: “The Virtuoso Double Bass,” “Trios and Scottish Song Settings of J. N. Hummel,” “Galant with an Attitude: Music of Juan and José Pla,” and “Quartets of Telemann and Bodinus.” A fifth CD, “Feliz Navidad: Christmas from Spain and New Spain,” was recently released on Meridian Records of London.

 

Committed to the music education and enrichment of young people and to reaching diverse audiences, Musicians of the Old Post Road pursues a variety of community outreach initiatives. The ensemble has brought programs and performances to inner-city students, to elderly groups, to rural audiences, to hospice residents, and to retirement communities.