12/8: Shriver Hall Concert Series Presents Baroque Band ACRONYM

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Mallory McFarland | Morahan Arts and Media
mallory@morahanartsandmedia.com | 646-241-0899

SHRIVER HALL CONCERT SERIES
WELCOMES BAROQUE BAND ACRONYM 
IN ITS BALTIMORE DEBUT

Sunday, December 8, 2024 at Shriver Hall

“outstanding young early-music string ensemble"
—The New Yorker

“…consummate style, grace, and unity of spirit” —The New York Times

www.ShriverConcerts.org

Baltimore, MD (October 16, 2024) — Shriver Hall Concert Series (SHCS) — Baltimore’s premier presenter of chamber music ensembles and solo recitalists — welcomes the Baroque band ACRONYM to Shriver Hall in its Baltimore Debut on Sunday, December 8, 2024 at 5:30 pm. ACRONYM’s 11 members perform on strings, violas da gamba, theorbo, and keyboards bringing “gutsy, fresh explorations” (Early Music America) to these rare musical treasures.

For this anticipated performance, ACRONYM presents a selection of music from 17th-century Vienna, a city in thrall to stylus fantasticus, a genre combining Italian drama and Northern European formal complexity. Featured composers include Giovanni Valentini, Antonio Bertali, Georg Piscator, Adam Drese, Johann Heinrich Schmelzer, Marc'Antonio Ziani, Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber, and Alessandro Poglietti.

“It's a thrill to bring our band ACRONYM to my hometown of Baltimore, and we are so honored to make our debut with Shriver Hall,” shares group member Loren Ludwig. “Our music is weird, wonderful, and mostly unknown—or unjustly forgotten. And I don’t use “band” lightly; we really do groove and jam in all the ways we imagine musicians were doing 350 years ago. I hope the Baltimore audience will enjoy our playful, virtuosic, seventeenth-century stylus fantasticus.”

Since its creation in 2012, ACRONYM has released 10 critically acclaimed albums. The band’s most recent album, Cantica Obsoleta, features the works from Sweden’s Düben Collection, which The Boston Globe described as a “musical time capsule” that “ offers enough resplendence to transport anyone.” Other recent projects include the first modern performances and recordings of works by Biber, Rosenmüller, and Capricornus.

Preceding ACRONYM’s appearance, Shriver Hall Concert Series presents the Escher String Quartet and violist Jordan Bak on Sunday, October 27, 2024 at 5:30 pm. Following ACRONYM’s concert are cellist Pablo Ferrández, who makes his Baltimore Recital Debut, and pianist Julio Elizalde on Sunday, January 19, 2025 at 5:30 pm.

SHCS’s free Discovery Series kicks off with guitarist Raphaël Feuillâtre’s Baltimore Debut on Saturday, November 16, 2024 at 3:00 pm at the Baltimore Museum of Art followed by violinist Wei Zhu, winner of the 2024 Yale Gordon Concerto Competition, on Saturday, February 8, 2025 at 3:00 pm also at the Baltimore Museum of Art.

Shriver Hall Concert Series’ season is made possible through generous support from the Maryland State Arts Council, Baltimore County Commission for Arts & Sciences, and Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts.

Concert Information
ACRONYM (Baltimore Debut)
Sunday, December 8, 2024, at 5:30 pm
Shriver Hall | 3400 N. Charles Street | Baltimore, MD 21218
Tickets: $46 Single Tickets and $10 Students
Link: shriverconcerts.org/acronym 

Program:
“Vienna: City of Music, City of Dreams”
GIOVANNI VALENTINI: Sonata a5 in C major
VALENTINI: Sonata a5 in G minor 
ANTONIO BERTALI: Sonata a5 in G minor
VALENTINI: Sonata a5 in A minor
BERTALI: Sonata a6 in E minor
GEORG PISCATOR: Sonata a7 in A minor
ADAM DRESE: Sonata a6 in C major
JOHANN HEINRICH SCHMELZER: Sonata a5 in D minor
PIETRO ANDREA ZIANI: Sonata a3 in A minor, Op. 7 
HEINRICH IGNAZ FRANZ BIBER: The Battle of Vienna in G minor (arr. A.A. Schmelzer)
BIBER: Ballettae a8 in C major
ALESSANDRO POGLIETTI: Sonata a8 in A minor
SCHMELZER: Serenata (Ciacona) a8 in A major

Artists:
ACRONYM, Baroque ensemble
            Chloe Fedor, Edwin Huizinga, Johanna Novom, Adriane Post, Beth Wenstrom, violins
            Kyle Miller, viola
            Kivie Cahn-Lipman, viola da gamba & violoncello
            Loren Ludwig, viola da gamba
            Paul Dwyer, cello
            Nathaniel Chase, violone
            Daniel Swenberg, theorbo
            Elliot Figg, harpsichord & organ

A Pre-Concert Conversation with the members of ACRONYM and WBJC's Judith Krummeck will take place at 4:30 pm in Shriver Hall before the concert.

The Paul & Barbara Krieger Early Music Concert

About ACRONYM
Baroque band ACRONYM — an "outstanding young early-music string ensemble" (The New Yorker)—is dedicated to giving modern premieres of the wild instrumental music of the 17th century. Playing with “…consummate style, grace, and unity of spirit” (The New York Times), the group formed in 2012 and has released 10 critically acclaimed albums. Recent projects include the first modern performances and recordings of works by Biber, Rosenmüller, and Capricornus, among others. The band’s most recent album, Cantica Obsoleta, features the modern premiere recordings of nearly-lost works from Sweden’s Düben Collection. The Boston Globe raves, “This musical time capsule offers enough resplendence to transport anyone.”

In the 2024-25 season, ACRONYM returns to the Naumburg Orchestral Concerts series in Central Park and makes its Baltimore debut with Shriver Hall Concert Series. Returning to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, ACRONYM collaborates with countertenor Reginald Mobley on a program of rarely-heard works from the early Baroque period. 

Recent engagements includes repeat performances at the Boston Early Music Festival, the Baldwin Wallace Bach Festival (OH), and Music Before 1800 in New York,  as well as appearances with Festival Oude Muziek Utrecht (Netherlands), Oberlin’s Artist Recital Series, Hamilton College Performing Arts Series (Clinton, NY), Lincoln Friends of Chamber Music (NE), Arizona Early Music, Indianapolis Early Music Festival, Renaissance & Baroque (Pittsburgh), Chamber Music Wilmington (NC), Electric Earth Concerts (Peterborough, NH), and Five Boroughs Music Festival in New York City. ACRONYM has held academic residencies at Youngstown State University and Vassar College, and the group’s musicians can also be heard in Tafelmusik, Les Arts Florissants, Apollo’s Fire, Handel Haydn Society and the English Concert.

About Shriver Hall Concert Series
For almost 60 years, Shriver Hall Concert Series (SHCS) has been “Baltimore’s finest importer of classical music talent” (The Baltimore Sun) and the area’s premier presenter of chamber music ensembles and solo recitalists with a mission to craft performances and educational programs at the highest level of excellence. A 5-time recipient of Baltimore Magazine’s distinction “Best Classical Music” in its annual “Best of Baltimore” issue, the coveted subscription series features many of the world’s most renowned soloists and ensembles, presented in The Johns Hopkins University’s Shriver Hall.

Founded in 1966 by Dr. Ernest Bueding, a pharmacologist at Johns Hopkins University, and a group of similarly dedicated music enthusiasts, SHCS set out to make an important contribution to the vitality of an already vibrant city. When flutist Jean-Pierre Rampal walked onto the stage of Shriver Hall for the first concert, more than 1,100 people witnessed the launch of what is now recognized as a remarkable success story: Shriver Hall Concert Series. In the succeeding years, SHCS has presented hundreds of acclaimed and emerging international artists in classical chamber music and recitals and a legacy of important debuts and premieres. In addition, SHCS collaborates with local schools and subsidizes hundreds of student tickets each season.

The list of artists presented by SHCS is remarkable—Radu Lupu, Murray Perahia, Ewa Podlés, Maurizio Pollini, Jacqueline du Pré, Mstislav Rostropovich, Jordi Savall, András Schiff, Rudolf Serkin, Janos Starker, Daniil Trifonov, Lynn Harrell, Emmanuel Ax, Alban Berg Quartet, Guarneri Quartet, Kronos Quartet, Cleveland Quartet, and Quartetto Italiano, among many others. SHCS also has a history of championing important musicians early in their careers, including Richard Goode, Hilary Hahn, Hélène Grimaud, Dawn Upshaw, Lang Lang, and the Emerson String Quartet. Commissioned composers include Timo Andres, Sebastian Currier, Han Lash, James Lee III, Jonathan Leshnoff, Caroline Shaw, Carlos Simon, and Nina C. Young.

Designed specifically for the community, SHCS’s Discovery Series is a set of free concerts presented in venues throughout the region focused on artists emerging on the national and international scene. Artists featured include Sterling Elliott, Narek Hakhnazaryan, Sheku and Isata Kanneh-Mason, Eric Lu, and the Dover Quartet. SHCS also offers the annual Spring Lecture Series, a series of free talks focused on annual topics related to the intersection of music and society and a variety of student programs.

For more information, visit www.shriverconcerts.org.

Photo of ACRONYM by Jeff Weeks

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