Susie Napper returns to Whidbey Island!

In this unique program, Susie Napper and Jeffrey Cohan demonstrate that intimate musical settings for 2 instruments have all of the intense expressive power of a much larger ensemble. Changes of harmony are crystal clear and rhythmic flexibility is ideally responsive to textual innuendo and emotional inflection. Poetry is ultimately at the core of most instrumental music and this program will make this case convincingly. It is striking that the highly ornamented vocal styles from Louis XIV’s France, Ireland and Scotland have so much in common with one another and that they speak so directly to us today.

Extraordinary viola da gambist Susie Napper from Montreal is one of today’s greatest musicians performing early music on period instruments and we are delighted to have her again in Freeland! Jeffrey Cohan will play flutes both from the Renaissance and the Baroque in a program that spans the two stylistic periods.

Cellist, gambist and continuo player par excellence, SUSIE NAPPER is known for her colorful, even controversial performances of both solo and chamber repertoire of the 17th and 18th centuries. Having spent her childhood in an artistic milieu in London, in her late teens she moved to New York to study at the Juilliard School, then to the Paris Conservatoire. San Francisco followed, where, after a foray into contemporary music, she co-founded and directed the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra. Since then she has spent two decades with a foot on either side of the Atlantic as principal cellist with several groups including Stradivaria in France, the Studio de Musique Ancienne de Montréal and Les Boréades in Montreal, and the Trinity Consort of Portland. Her concert tours have taken her as far afield as China, Japan, New Zealand, India, the Middle East, as well as most European countries. As a member of the very active viol duo Les Voix humaines, she has discovered a new facet of musical expression in the form of musical arranging, thus providing an endlessly fascinating new repertoire for two viols. Susie Napper founded the Festival international Montréal Baroque which is presented in Montreal in June since 2001. She teaches at McGill University as well as in Copenhagen, and was awarded the «Prix Opus» 2002 for «Personality of the year» by the Conseil québécois de la musique. Her recordings, which include most of the known repertoire for two viols, can be heard on Harmonia Mundi, EMI, Erato, ADDA, CBC Records, Naxos, and most notably on the ATMA label.