About

Elizabeth Blumenstock

Elizabeth Blumenstock is a long-time concertmaster, soloist, and leader with the Bay Area’s Philharmonia Baroque and American Bach Soloists, concertmaster of the International Handel Festival Orchestra in Goettingen, Germany, and Artistic Director of the Corona del Mar Baroque Music Festival. Her love of chamber music has involved her in several accomplished smaller ensembles including Voices of Music, Galax Quartet, Live Oak Baroque, Ars Lyrica Houston Chamber Players, Sarasa, and Severall Friends. Ms. Blumenstock teaches for Juilliard’s Historical Performance Program, at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, American Bach Soloists’ Summer Festival and Academy, the International Baroque Institute at Longy, and the Valley of the Moon Music Festival. She plays a 1660 Andrea Guarneri violin built in Cremona, Italy, on generous loan to her from the Philharmonia Baroque Period Instrument Trust.

David Morris

Dubbed a “basso continuo wizard” by Gramophone (UK), David Morris has made a specialty of performing 17th- and 18th-c. music on a variety of historical bass instruments including the viola da gamba, baroque cello, bass violin and lirone.  He has performed in the U.S. and abroad with the Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra, Tafelmusik, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Mark Morris Dance Group. He has recorded for Harmonia Mundi, Drag City Records (Joanna Newsom’s double-CD, Have One on Me), CBC/ Radio-Canada and New Line Cinema (as viola da gamba soloist for The Nativity Story).  He is a frequent coach at the Viola da Gamba Society of America’s regional workshops as well at its national Conclaves, and has also taught at the Amherst and Madison Early Music Workshops.

Kati Kyme, violin, enjoys a rich musical life as chamber musician, orchestral player, teacher, and conductor. She has been a member and frequent leader of Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra and American Bach Soloists since their inaugural seasons.  She has enjoyed 15 years as violinist and violist of the Artaria Quartet, the Sierra String Quartet and, most recently, the New Esterhazy Quartet which is finishing its second cycle of performances of the complete Haydn String Quartets.
An enthusiastic teacher, she has led ensembles at the SF Conservatory of Music and the San Francisco Youth Orchestra, and her main commitment to young players is her decades-long relationship with the California Youth Symphony where she conducts rehearsals of three different String Orchestras every Sunday.

For the past 5 years, Ms. Kyme has joyfully lead the ensemble Berkeley Baroque Strings in weekly rehearsals. They have performed in three Berkeley Early Music Festivals and anticipate a successful appearance at the Boston Early Music Festival this June.

Multi-instrumentalist Shira Kammen has spent well over half her life exploring early and other intriguing styles of music. A member for many years of the early music Ensembles Alcatraz and Project Ars Nova, Medieval Strings, and Fortune’s Wheel, she has also worked with Sequentia, Hesperion XX, the Boston Camerata, the Balkan group Kitka, Anonymous IV, the King’s Noyse, the Newberry and Folger Consorts, Tenet, the Rose Ensemble, Parthenia, the Oregon, California and San Francisco Shakespeare Festivals, and is the founder of Class V Music, an ensemble dedicated to providing music on river rafting trips. She has performed and taught in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Europe, Israel, Morocco, Latvia, Russia, Abu Dhabi and Japan, and on the Colorado, Rogue, Green, Grande Ronde, East Carson and Klamath Rivers.

Shira happily collaborated with singer/storyteller John Fleagle for fifteen years, and with her medieval music mentor Margriet Tindemans for thirty years, and performs now with several groups, including a new music ensemble, Ephemeros; an English Country Dance/Contradance band, Roguery; the early music ensembles Sitka Trio, Calextone and In Bocca al Lupo, Vajra Voices, the chamber chorus Gallimaufry, as well as frequent collaborations with performers such as storyteller/harpist Patrick Ball,, singer Anne Azema, fiddler Kaila Flexer, poets Jane Hirshfield and Kay Ryan, clown Jeff Raz, and in many theatrical and dance productions, including the California Revels and The American Repertory Ballet Company. Shira has been involved with the California Revels since 1989, and has served as associate music director for nearly 2 decades. She has worked with students in many different settings, among them teaching summer music workshops in the woods, coaching students of early music in such schools as Yale University, Case Western, the University of Oregon at Eugene, Boston University, and instructing at specialized seminars at the Fondazione Cini in Venice, Italy and the Scuola Cantorum Basiliensis in Switzerland.

She has played on several television and movie soundtracks, including ‘O’, a modern high school-setting of Othello and ‘’The Nativity Story’, and has accompanied many diverse artists in recording projects, among them singers Azam Ali, Joanna Newsom, and David Hidalgo of Los Lobos. Some of her original music can be heard in an independent film about fans of the work of JRR Tolkien. The strangest place Shira has played is in the elephant pit of the Jerusalem Zoo.