Dana Maiben, Sarah Cunningham, Lisa Goode Crawford
Biography Dana Maiben, Sarah Cunningham, Lisa Goode Crawford
Dana Maiben
Hailed by the Boston Globe for her “supremely joyous artistry,” baroque violinist, violist, harpsichordist, composer and conductor Dana Maiben has been cited as “high priestess of the Italian 17th-century solo” by Continuo Magazine. The Plain Dealer wrote of her Cleveland debut featuring Biber’s Mystery Sonatas, “she articulated each phrase with the clarity of speech and the fluency of song…So expressive was the music and so communicative Maiben’s performance that the technical difficulties melted away and the notes spoke more eloquently than a sermon.”
Dana has served as concertmaster for Apollo Ensemble, Arcadia Players, Ensemble Abendmusik, American Opera Theater, and for the New York Collegium under the direction of Christophe Rousset, Martin Gester, Paul Goodwin, and Andrew Parrott. Maiben made her professional conducting debut in 1993 with Handel’s Acis and Galatea, and has made early opera a specialty, often leading from the harpsichord. She has been a frequent guest director for orchestras in Atlanta, Ann Arbor, Amherst, Cambridge, Ithaca, Rochester, Saint Paul, and Toronto, many times leading from the violin as featured soloist. Maiben has served as Music Director for Genesee Baroque Players (New York) and Arcadia Players, (Massachusetts), and is founding Music Director of Foundling Baroque Orchestra and Women’s Advocacy Project (Rhode Island, www.foundling.org).
Dana has toured throughout North America, Europe, and in Asia as a collaborative chamber musician, earning international recognition for her performances of 17th- century solo and ensemble music. As a founder member of the groundbreaking ensemble Concerto Castello, whose debut recording Affetti Musicali won a nomination for the Deutches Schallplatten Preis, she performed opposite acclaimed cornetto virtuoso Bruce Dickey for seven seasons, and designed and co-directed the quadricentennial Schütz celebration concert for the Boston Early Music Festival. Dana is a founder member of the string band Quince (www.quincefive.org), and in 2002 she launched a new ensemble for 17th-century music, Concerto Incognito.
As a medieval fiddler, Dana was a founding member of Sequentia and has toured programs of medieval music with Boston Camerata, Tapestry, and musica mundana. She has performed many modern day premieres, and as a founding member of New Quartet (Boston) and guest artist with Les Coucous Benevoles (Toronto), has premiered many new works written for baroque instruments. Recording credits include music from the 12th through the 20th centuries, projects for BMG, Centaur, Dorian, Deutsches Harmonia Mundi, EMI, Erato, fuga libera, Gothic, Hyperion, Kleos, and Lyrichord.
Dana began her early music studies while an undergraduate at Oberlin Conservatory, and continued with advanced studies at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, where she studied medieval, renaissance, baroque and classical European music and historical performance practices. She holds a BA cum laude from Smith College, earned the Master of Music degree in Composition from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and counts Jaap Schroeder, James Caldwell, Thomas Binkley, Andrea von Ramm, Elaine Richey, Ron Perera and Lou Harrison as important mentors.
A skilled clinician and master chamber music coach, Dana has served on the faculties of the Eastman School of Music, the International Baroque Institute at Longy, Amherst Early Music Festival’s Baroque Academy, and numerous summer workshops, has been artist-in-residence or guest faculty at Case Western Reserve University and Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music, and is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University. Since 1989, Dana has been a member of the Early Music faculty at the Longy School of Music of Bard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she teaches baroque violin and viola, medieval fiddles, instrumental chamber music, concerted vocal music, figured bass, improvisation, and medieval, renaissance and baroque repertories and performance practice, coaches singers, guest conducts the Longy Chamber Orchestra, and directs Early Opera.
Sarah Cunningham
is recognized as one of the foremost viola da gambists worldwide. She trained at Harvard University, the Longy School of Music (with Gian Lyman Silbiger), and the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, Netherlands (with Wieland Kuijken). In the 1970s she was deeply influenced by the teaching of the legendary Marleen Montgomery, whose emphasis on breath, awareness, profound listening, and the spiritual power of music remain at the core of Sarah’s practice today. Also in the 1970s, she formed the baroque ensemble Musick for the Generall Peace, with violinist Jeanne Lamon and harpsichordist Robert Hill, and the viola da gamba trio Les Filles de Sainte Colombe, with Mary Springfels and Wendy Gillespie.
After moving to London in 1981, she was co-founder, with violinist Monica Huggett and harpsichordist Mitzi Meyerson, of Trio Sonnerie, with whom she recorded much of the important chamber music for violin and viol, and toured on four continents between 1982 and 1997. She was invited by Sir James Galway to collaborate on his CDs of Bach’s flute music, and toured with him in Europe and the USA. Her solo CDs were released on ASV and EMI/Virgin Classics, and she has appeared as recitalist from Helsinki to Vancouver. As concerto soloist she has recorded works by Telemann with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment under Monica Huggett. She has performed in Europe, North and South America, Australia, Japan, Turkey, and Russia with numerous groups and conductors including Jordi Savall, Fretwork, Phantasm, Simon Rattle, Ton Koopman, John Eliot Gardiner, Gustav Leonhardt, and others.
In 1999 she moved to the west coast of Ireland, where she founded and directed the East Cork Early Music Festival at the invitation of County Cork’s music officer Ian MacDonagh.
From 1990–2000 she was Professor of viola da gamba at the Hochschule für Künste in Bremen, Germany. Since returning to the USA in 2009, she has been on the faculty of The Juilliard School’s newly created Historical Performance Department; and since fall of 2018 she also teaches at Princeton University. A long-time favorite at the Amherst Early Music Festival, in 2018 she founded a unique annual summer Viol Intensive program co-taught with Italian viol player Paolo Pandolfo, as part of Amherst’s Baroque Academy.
In 2016 she completed her BA at Bryn Mawr College, in Interdisciplinary Arts and Performance. As part of this self-created independent major she studied choreography with David Brick and Madeline Cantor, dance with Molly Shanahan, experimental performance at the Headlong Institute, conceptual art with John Muse, and creative writing with Daniel Torday. She also studied visual art at the Main Line Art Center with abstract painter and pastelist Val Rossman.
Her long-time fascination with improvisation has led to collaborations with dancers Tara Brandel and Leah Stein, percussionist Kyle Struve, and poet Katherine Cartwright, as well as with other poets and storytellers in the USA and abroad.
Lisa Goode Crawford
is Emerita Professor of Harpsichord at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, where she was a central figure in that institution’s early music program from 1973-2005. She holds the A.B. and M.A. degrees in music from Harvard University. In 1968 she was one of the first winners of the Erwin Bodky Award for performers of early music. Ms. Crawford has given solo and ensemble performances throughout the U.S. and in Europe and Japan. She was a member of the renowned Oberlin Baroque Ensemble and continues as a faculty member at the summer Baroque Performance Institute at Oberlin, where she has taught since 1974. She has performed with Apollo’s Fire, Les Délices, the Smithsonian Chamber Players, and numerous other ensembles and artists. She has edited the keyboard music of Pancrace Royer for the series “Le Pupitre” published by Heugel (Paris). After producing and directing Royer’s ballet héroique, Le Pouvoir de l’Amour (1743), at Oberlin (February 2002), supported by a grant from the Florence Gould Foundation, she prepared a critical edition of this opera, published in 2006 by the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles.
Together with Mitzi Meyerson, Ms. Crawford has recorded two-harpsichord arrangements of the harpsichord music of Gaspard Le Roux for Harmonia Mundi France, using two eighteenth-century French harpsichords in the Russell Collection at the University of Edinburgh. She has recorded solo works of Royer and Rameau and J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations, and has participated in ensemble recording projects for Vox, Gasparo, and Smithsonian Recordings. Other recording projects have been been two solo recordings of music by J.S. Bach and François Couperin, performed on the 1624 Ruckers harpsichord at the Musée d’Unterlinden, Colmar, France; and ensemble recordings with Les Délices (“The Tastes Reunited”, 2009) and Christopher Palameta, oboe (Marais “Suites for Oboe”, 2014).
One of the most respected harpsichord teachers in the U.S., Ms. Crawford conducts master classes and adjudicates performance competitions.
In retirement from teaching at Oberlin, Crawford has been a chercheuse associée at the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles. Her most recent large project, supported by a Mellon Emeritus Fellowship, was a performance at the Château de Versailles, and the preparation of critical edition of, Royer’s 1730 tragédie lyrique, Pirrhus. A recording of the performance was released in 2014 on the record label Alpha, and the critical edition was published by the CMBV in 2015.
