Musician Profiles

JULIE ANDRIJESKI, fiddle, viola, vielle, is one of the USA’s leading baroque violinists and is a respected specialist in 17th-century repertoire. An active baroque dance teacher and performer, she is a founding member of Apollo’s Fire, Artistic Director of the Atlanta Baroque Orchestra, and Co-director of the 17th-century ensemble Quicksilver. A full-time faculty member in the CWRU Music Department, she directs the baroque music and dance ensembles and teaches seminars in historical performance. She also teaches baroque violin at the Cleveland Institute of Music and leads baroque dance seminars at The Juilliard School. In 2016 she received a coveted Creative Workforce Fellowship from Cuyahoga Arts and Culture as well as Early Music America’s Thomas Binkley award for excellence in performance and scholarship.

TINA BERGMANN, hammered dulcimer, was hailed by Pete Seeger as “the best hammered dulcimer player I’ve heard in my life.” A fourthgeneration musician, Bergmann began playing music at age eight, learning the mountain dulcimer from her mother in the aural tradition and learning the hammered dulcimer at the knee of West Virginia-native builder and performer Loy Swiger. Demonstrating gifts for both performance and teaching, she has been a featured performer across the United States, performing solo; as a duo with her husband, bassist Bryan Thomas; with her stringband Hu$hmoney; and as a featured soloist with Apollo’s Fire and Canadian early music group, La Nef.

BRIAN BIGLEY, Uilleann pipes, Irish flute, and dancer, has studied the Irish uilleann pipes for nearly 25 years as a player as well as a maker of the instrument. He has toured North America and Europe extensively as both a musician and dancer, appearing in shows such as Tomàseen Foley’s A Celtic Christmas, the Omaha Symphony’s Celtic Journey, and Apollo’s Fire Countryside Concerts. In 2002 and 2003 he competed with great distinction at the World Irish Dance Championships held in Glasgow and Killarney. He has recently released his fourth recording of traditional Irish music - Dance the Town Green in conjunction with the New York School of Irish Dance.

LUKE CONKLIN, harps, shawm & medieval bagpipes, was a member of the first class of historical performers at the Juilliard School. He earned his doctorate in Historical Performance from Case Western Reserve University. He has performed with Portland Baroque, The American Bach Soloists, Trinity Wall Street Baroque Orchestra, Clarion Music Society, and many others. He maintains a small teaching studio in Kalamazoo, Michigan. In addition to performing Early Music on many instruments, he also plays Irish and Scottish flute and harp.

IAN CRANE, Scottish bagpipes, teaches music at Cuyahoga Falls High School. He spent five years on faculty at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, as instructor of bagpipes. He has performed at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the Smithsonian Folklife Festival and has sung with Contrapunctus, Quire Cleveland, and Bobby McFerrin. He earned a Bachelor’s degree in music education from Cleveland State University and a Master’s in conducting from Kent State University.

SUSANNA PERRY GILMORE, fiddle, enjoys a multifaceted career as solo artist, chamber musician, and orchestral concertmaster. Performing on both modern and period instruments and versatile in diverse styles from classical to fiddling, she is hailed as a player who is both “thrilling and sensitive” by the Memphis Commercial Appeal, “luminous and hypnotic” by the Omaha World-Herald, and “authentic with exquisite good taste” and “rich in tone, bringing musical depth and a human touch” by the Cleveland Plain Dealer. As concertmaster of the Omaha Symphony she frequently appears as a soloist including recent performances of the Scottish Fantasy by Max Bruch, Tzigane by Ravel, Berg Violin Concerto, Prokofiev Violin Concerto No. 1, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Mozart Concerto No. 5 and the Korngold Violin Concerto as well as major concertmaster solos such as Rimsky Korsakov Scheherazade and Strauss Ein Heldenleben. She holds degrees from Oxford University and the New England Conservatory and is the violinist on Apollo’s Fire’s best-selling CD recordings Sugarloaf Mountain and Sephardic Journey.

BRIAN KAY, plucked instruments, vocals, is a modern-day troubadour. He is the first Artistic Leadership Fellow of Apollo’s Fire and in 2019, won a Grammy® Award for his work on the CD Songs of Orpheus. He has performed throughout the world at venues such as the National Concert Hall of Dublin, Belfast Castle (Ireland), Carnegie Hall, and the Kennedy Center. His live radio appearances include NPR, WYPR and 98ROCK (Baltimore), WGBH (Boston), and WCLV (Cleveland). He has recorded for AVIE and Sono Luminus labels, and has been heard on more than ten album releases. He is a multiinstrumentalist, songwriter, arranger, traditional and historical music specialist, poet, and painter.

RENÉ SCHIFFER, viola da gamba & cello, is praised for his “interpretive imagination and patrician command of the cello” (THE CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER). He is a native of Holland where he was a protégé of Anner Bijlsma. He later studied baroque cello with Jaap ter Linden and viola da gamba with Catharina Meints. As a member of Sigiswald Kuijken’s La Petite Bande for sixteen years, he toured four continents and appeared many times on European television. He has also performed with the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra, Les Musiciens du Louvre, and in over forty projects with Tafelmusik of Toronto. As a concerto soloist, he has appeared throughout North America and Europe, and can be heard on acclaimed CD recordings of the Vivaldi Concerto for Two Cellos and the Tango Concerto for Two Gambas (his own composition) on British label AVIE. He can be heard on more than forty CD recordings, on the Harmonia Mundi, Philips, Virgin Classics, Erato, Sony, and AVIE labels. He serves on the faculty of the Cleveland Institute of Music as Teacher of Baroque Cello, and has given masterclasses and coachings for the New World Symphony (Miami), the University of Michigan, Oberlin Conservatory, and Cincinnati College-Conservatory.

KATHIE STEWART, wooden flutes, is a founding member and principal flutist of Apollo’s Fire. A faculty member at the Cleveland Institute of Music, she is also a Kulas Visiting Artist at CWRU, and former Curator of Harpsichords at the Oberlin Conservatory where she taught baroque flute for nearly twenty years. She is an avid proponent of Celtic music, playing Irish flute on several recordings from Apollo’s Fire. She has performed with the Cleveland Orchestra, Tafelmusik, The Four Nations Ensemble, Oberlin Baroque Ensemble, ARTEK, and the Bach Sinfonia in Washington, D.C. and is the Assistant Director of the Seattle Baroque Flute Workshop.

EMI TANABE, fiddle, holds a Professional Diploma from Roosevelt University and a Master’s degree in music from the University of North Texas. She is an adjunct faculty at Benedictine University in Chicago, IL. Emi enjoys multifaceted career; she performs not only with Baroque ensembles but performs with Jazz/Latin groups, world music groups, Cirque du Soleil type of dinner shows and more.