Arcadia Players

Overview

Over the past twenty years, Arcadia Players has established itself as one of the most creative, visionary and exciting ensembles, not only in Western Massachusetts, but for many miles around. Lauded by the press, their unique blend of historical performance practice and expert musicians makes for both sophisticated and passionate performances. Under the leadership of world-renowned Early Music specialist Ian Watson and playing on period instruments, Arcadia Players bring new light and life to repertoire ranging from Monteverdi and seventeenth century music for viols, to chamber music by Schumann and Weber, as well as Haydn and Beethoven, symphonies. No other group in Massachusetts offers such diverse repertoire played on instruments of the period. Hear Beethoven’s music the way audiences of his time would have heard it!

Related Sites

• Arcadia Players web site

Program

Concerto, Song Cycle, and Symphony: An all Beethoven Program

• An die ferne Geliebte
• Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major
• Symphony No. 1 in C major
• This concert gives a wonderful opportunity to hear three very different facets of Beethoven's work played on instruments of the period. An die ferne Geliebte (To the distant beloved) is widely considered to be the first true song cycle. The Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major was premiered by Beethoven himself and reviewed after that performance as "...the most admirable, singular, artistic and complex Beethoven concerto ever." The Symphony No. 1 in C major, composed in 1800, stands astride the Classical and Romantic styles, indebted to Haydn but also pressing the bounds of classical form.

About the Artists

Ian Watson has played with most of the leading British orchestras, including the London Symphony, Royal Philharmonic, City of Birmingham Symphony, BBC Welsh, BBC Philharmonic, English Chamber Orchestra, Scottish Chamber Orchestra, The Academy of Ancient Music, English Baroque Soloists and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields. He has made many recordings and toured world-wide with the Academy. 

In addition to appearing on nearly 200 broadcasts and recordings, including as solo pianist on a recent award-winning CD with Renee Fleming and the English Chamber Orchestra, he is featured on many film soundtracks including Amadeus, Casper, Polanski's Death and the Maiden, Mr. Holland's Opus, Restoration, Cry the Beloved Country and Hidden Voices. He has made cameo appearances in the Oscar-winning Madness of King George and John Osbourne's England My England. In 2000, the 250th anniversary of J.S. Bach's death, Ian Watson was invited to be Sir John Eliot Gardiner's assistant conductor for the Bach Cantata Pilgrimage, a world-wide tour of the complete Bach Cantatas performed on the correct liturgical day and particularly in places where Bach lived and worked. In the same year, he conducted the Academy of St Martin in the Fields Orchestra and Chorus in Bach's B minor Mass (BWV 232) as the final concert of the Rheingau Festival in Germany. In the last three months of 2001, he undertook a 47-concert tour of the British Isles both playing and directing Mozart Piano Concertos as well as conducting the Dalarna Sinfonietta in Sweden and taking part in recordings of Haydn Masses with Collegium Musicum 90 and Britten's Albert Herring with Richard Hickox.

In 2003, he conducted more concerts in Sweden and toured to Salzburg and Vienna with Sir John Eliot Gardiner and the English Baroque Soloists as well as inaugurating the first highly successful St Paul's Music Festival at St Paul's Cathedral in Worcester, MA, where he currently holds the position of music director. In March 2004 he took part in the Monteverdi Choir’s 40th Birthday Celebration, culminating in a performance of Monteverdi’s Vespers in St. Mark’s, Venice. In 2003 Ian Watson was appointed as the new Artistic Director of Arcadia Players

Monica Jakuc (pronounced Ya kutch) is the Elsie Irwin Sweeney Professor of Music at Smith, where she has taught since 1969. Her performance of J. S. Bach's "Goldberg" Variations at Merkin Hall was hailed by New York Times music critic Tim Page as "an auspicious debut...one will observe Miss Jakuc's career with more than usual interest."

A champion of contemporary music, Ms. Jakuc opened her 1988 London debut recital with the first performance of a work written especially for her by Ronald Perera. New York audiences first heard her perform in 1980 at Alice Tully Hall in "A Program of Twentieth-Century Music for Two Pianos" with pianist Kenneth Fearn. Other concert highlights include a series of recitals in Japan, many appearances on the East and West Coasts, and a highly successful tour in Alaska.

In recent years, she has featured the music of women composers on her programs, which have included appearances at two national conferences: Feminist Theory and Music III in Riverside, California, and "Women in Music: the Last 100 Years" in Athens, Ohio. She has also been a featured artist at International Association of Women in Music concerts in London and Washington. She has given lecture-recitals on women composers at Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and at colleges in the Northeast.

Inspired by Malcolm Bilson, Monica Jakuc has also performed on early pianos since 1986. As a frequently invited guest artist in a series of Historical Piano Concerts, she has played instruments from the E.M. Frederick Collection in Ashburnham, Massachusetts. She was both an organizer of, as well as a performing artist in, HaydnFest 1990, an international conference of scholars and performers held at Smith College, and co-sponsored by the Westfield Center for Early Keyboard Studies. She has also appeared as guest soloist with Arcadia Players, and will debut her new 6 1/2 octave McNulty fortepiano in their series this season playing Schubert's "Winterreise" with Peter W. Shea, tenor.

With noted early music violinist Dana Maiben, she recorded Francesca LeBrun's complete Opus 1 Sonatas for Fortepiano and Violin on Dorian Discovery. She has also played fortepiano sonatas by Marianne von Martinez, Marianna von Auenbrugger, and Joseph Haydn on a Titanic Records CD. Her new recording of "Fantasies for Fortepiano" by Mozart, Haydn, C.P.E. Bach and Beethoven is now available on cdbaby.com.

Born in Newark, New Jersey, Monica Jakuc received her Bachelor's and Master's degrees from The Juilliard School, where she studied with James Friskin and Beveridge Webster. She later worked with Leon Fleisher at the Peabody Conservatory and with Russell Sherman in Boston. Konrad Wolff, renowned pianist, pedagogue and historian, was also one of her mentors.

Peter W. Shea has sung professionally since 1972 throughout New England and the Hudson Valley. He is a frequent soloist with groups such as Arcadia Players, Hampshire Choral Society, Commonwealth Opera, and the Brattleboro Community Chorus. He also performs regularly with vocal and instrumental chamber ensembles including the vocal ensemble Cantabile, with choral groups such as Novi Cantori, and can be heard as a soloist in music series like the New England Bach Festival and the Mohawk Trail Concerts. He is a member of the Arcadia Players board of directors, and served as co-Artistic Director for the 2003-2004 season.

Peter was born in 1954 in Lewiston, Maine, into a musical family that has produced many professional singers going back at least three generations on his father's side. His musical education as a child was singing in his father's church choirs at Court Street Baptist Church in Auburn, Maine; his mother was a school librarian. After graduating from high school in Buckfield, Maine, he studied voice with Arthur Koret at the Hartt School, University of Hartford, librarianship at Southern Connecticut State University, and historical musicology at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. He has taken part in several vocal master classes with baritone Sanford Sylvan. Peter's musical interests are very wide-ranging, covering art song and vocal chamber music from 1500 through the present, with special emphasis on German lieder.