About the Artists

conductor

Over the last decades Skip Sempé has flourished as a harpsichordist, chamber musician, conductor, artistic director, teacher, coach, lecturer, scholar, and writer. He is the founder of the ensembles Capriccio Stravagante, the Capriccio Stravagante Renaissance Orchestra and Capriccio Stravagante Les 24 Violons, and has served as the artistic director of the Paradizo label, the Piccola Accademia di Montisi, the Paris-based Terpsichore festival, and been an artist in residence at BOZAR in Brussels and at the Utrecht Early Music Festival. Considered to be one of the last pioneers of the early music movement, Sempé has recovered and preserved a musical aesthetic and artistic mission that is slipping away. With over forty prizewinning recordings as a soloist and with Capriccio Stravagante, concerts worldwide, and a collection of thought-provoking essays, Memorandum XXI, he has revolutionized early music performance and challenged a dated, standardized ‘Baroque sound’. Once a student of Gustav Leonhardt, Sempé is an original seeker with a rich imagination, a musical philosopher who thinks about historical performance practice and a persuasive essayist who expresses his individual ideas on artistic history with verve. Above all, he is a musician who beguiles and astounds with his magical-sensual store of previously unheard sounds. His superb sense of harpsichord touch, finely tuned ear for achieving variation in the instrument’s sonority, and spontaneous musical personality supported by virtuosic keyboard skills has made him a coveted ‘test pilot’ for some of the finest harpsichord makers of our time. In 2006, he founded the Paradizo label, which has released many prizewinning recordings as well as Memorandum XXI, a collection of Skip Sempé’s essays on music and performance with five CDs. Sempé’s previous twenty recordings are all still available on the Deutsche Harmonia Mundi, Astrée, Alpha, Teldec and Mirare labels. He is regularly invited as a guest director, and has performed with Julien Martin, Josh Cheatham, Olivier Fortin, Pierre Hantaï, Sophie Gent, Doron Sherwin, Jordi Savall and the ensembles Collegium Vocale Gent, Pygmalion, Vox Luminis, Capella Cracoviensis, Chanticleer, Les Voix Humaines, the Studio de Musique Ancienne de Montréal, the Helsinki Baroque Orchestra and the Concert des Nations. Sempé’s solo harpsichord and ensemble performances have inspired generations of young musicians. He has served on the international harpsichord juries of Brugge, Leipzig and Rouen, and also teaches extensively, including the annual masterclasses at the Villa Medici / Académie de France à Rome. Skip Sempé is a chevalier dans l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

oboe

Marc Schachman, a Berkeley native, attended Stanford University and the Juilliard School, where he was awarded the B.S, M.S. and the D.M.A degrees. A favorite with Philharmonia audiences, he has been a constant presence with the orchestra for thirty years in the golden era with Nicholas McGegan and can be heard on all PBO’s recordings. One of the world’s leading performers on early oboes, Mr. Schachman is a founding member of some of America’s foremost period instrument chamber groups—The Aulos Ensemble (1973), The Amadeus Winds (1983), and The Helicon Winds (1994). In addition to Philharmonia, he has performed as principal oboist and soloist with virtually all of this country’s “original instrument” orchestras, including Handel and Haydn Society and Boston Baroque (Boston), The American Classical Orchestra (New York), and the Smithsonian Chamber Orchestra (Washington, D.C.). His numerous recordings on historical oboes cover a wide variety of styles and genres, and include the Mozart Oboe Quartet and Bach Cantatas (Harmonia Mundi), the Mozart Oboe Concerto (Musicmasters/MHS), Concerti and Chamber Music of Bach, Handel, Telemann, Rameau, and Vivaldi with the Aulos Ensemble (Centaur/Musicmasters), Bach’s

Brandenburg Concerti, Orchestral Suites, Magnificat and B Minor Mass (Telarc), wind music of Mozart and Beethoven (Naxos, Decca, Sony), and the Schumann Romances for oboe and piano (Helicon), which The New York Times described as “pure magic”. His solo recording of Venetian Oboe Concerti (Centaur) with the American Classical Orchestra includes the iconic Albinoni D minor concerto heard on tonight’s program. He has given workshops and master classes at the Juilliard School, Yale School of Music, the Curtis Institute of Music, San Francisco Conservatory and at colleges and universities throughout the U.S. Worldwide festival performances include Spoleto, Edinburgh, Goettingen, Perth, Tanglewood, Ravinia, Caramoor, and Mostly Mozart. In 2017, Marc, with his wife the violinist Linda Quan, moved back to the Bay Area from New York and together with some of his closest colleagues in Philharmonia founded the Cantata Collective. The ensemble presents free concerts of Bach cantatas, an oboist’s dream repertoire, and has just released the first in an ongoing series of recordings on Centaur records.