Rebecca Huber (USA) studied violin performance with Almita Vamos and Milan Vitek at the Oberlin Conservatory of music and with Kati Debretzeni and Catherine Mackintosh at the Koninklijk Conservatorium in Den Haag. Since 2012, she has been the artistic director and concert master of Symphonie Atlantique which has performed extensively throughout the Netherlands, as well as toured Spain and Mexico.Rebecca performs with numerous chamber ensembles and orchestras around the world. She is a member of B’Rock in Belgium, Modelo 62, the Elliot quartet, the Richter ensemble, and frequently collaborates with Opera2day. For the last several years, she has also performed frequently in the United States and Mexico, performing with Ars Lyrica in Houston, and La Fontegara and Cepromusic in Mexico.
Rebecca also teaches extensively and has taught several workshops at conservatories and festivals throughout Mexico, such as UNAM in Mexico City, the Celaya and Jalapa conservatories of music, Festival Huellas in Patzcuaro, and with Barroquissimo in Mexico City. Rebecca now teaches string quartets at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague.
Petra Somlai was born in Hungary where she graduated in conducting and piano performance at the Béla Bartók Conservatory (Budapest) and completed her modern piano degree at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music (Budapest) in 2007. During these years the focus of her interest gradually turned to the authentic interpretation on period instruments. She studied fortepiano and harpsichord at the Birmingham Conservatory and later under the direction of Fabio Bonizzoni, Menno van Delft, and Bart van Oort at the Sweelinck Conservatory at Amsterdam and the Royal Conservatory at The Hague where she graduated summa cum laude in 2011. In 2010 Petra Somlai won first prize and the audience award at the International Fortepiano Competition in Bruges (Belgium). In the same year she received the National Junior Prima Primissima Award of Hungary as outstanding young artist. She performs at major international early music festivals such as the Brugge Musica Antiqua Festival; Utrecht Early Music Festival; Haydn Festival Eszterháza; Beethoven Festival Bonn, Budapest Beethoven Festival; Bach Festival Dordrecht; Klara Festival Brussels; AMUZ Festival Antwerp; Musikfestspiele Potsdam Sanssouci; etc, and has given concerts all over Europe, the USA, and Japan. Since 2012 she has performed often as a conducting soloist with various orchestras. Petra Somlai was a professor of Early Keyboards on the faculty of University of North Texas (USA) from 2013-2015. Currently she is professor of fortepiano at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague.
Takako Kunugi was born in Japan and began her studies on modern bassoon at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, discovering baroque bassoon after her graduation. In 2000 she was the winner of the woodwind section Tokyo Bunka Kaikan Debut Concert competition as well as performing with a number of orchestras including the Tokyo Kosei Wind Orchestra, where she was principal bassoon, the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra and the Bach Collegium Japan.Since this time, Takako moved to Amsterdam to continue her studies at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam where she studied modern bassoon with Ronald Karten and baroque bassoon with Benny Aghassi. In 2011, she received a Masters diploma with honoured cum laude and a year later she received her Bachelor diploma of baroque bassoon.
After the graduation she performs as a principal bassoon player with some of the world’s leading ensembles and musicians including Bach Collegium Japan, Yokohama Sinfonietta, the Nieuwe Philharmonie Utrecht, the Holland Baroque, the Symphonie Atlantiques, Die Kölner Akademie, Die Wiener Akadimie, De Nederlandse Bachvereniging, Gabrieli Consort & Players, and The Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, Le Cercle de L’Harmonie(Jérémie Rhorer), B’Rock Orchestra (René Jacobs).
Rebecca Rosen began learning cello at the age of 9 in Los Angeles. In 2000, after she graduated summa cum laude from the University of California Los Angeles with a Bachelor of Arts degree in music theory, she began studying baroque cello with Elisabeth LeGuin. Her education was broadened through masterclasses with Phoebe Carrai and Christophe Coin.In 2002, Rebecca was awarded the J. William Fulbright grant to study baroque cello with Jaap ter Linden at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, Netherlands. There she earned her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in early music performance.
She is principal cellist of B’Rock Baroque Orchestra Ghent, Collegium Musicum Den Haag, Les Passions de l’Ame, and Symphonie Atlantique and is a member of the chamber groups La Cicala and Ensemble Bonne Corde. In addition, Rebecca performs with such distinguished ensembles as Capriccio Stravagante, Les Ambassadeurs, La Dolcezza, Pygmalion, Les Musiciens du Louvre, and La Scintilla (with Cecilia Bartoli).
Rebecca plays a cello built in 1745 by Joann Andreas Kämbl. Her interest in the historical development of the cello led her to learn its larger ancestor, the basse de violon, allowing her the joy of including 16th and 17th century music in her repertoire.
Joanna Marsden is a ‘fabulous’ (the Whole Note) flautist based in Montréal, Québec. She has performed recently in Belgium, Canada, Mexico, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States “beautifully” (Luis Gago, Madrid) and “with notable rhetorical clarity” (Boston Musical Intelligencer).
She is a founding member of Poiesis (Montréal) and Symphonie Atlantique (The Hague). She has performed with Les Idées heureuses, Arion, Sonate 1704, Rezonance Baroque, Compagnie Baroque Mont-Royal, the Ottawa Baroque Consort, and Boston’s l’Académie and worked with conductors including Ton Koopman, Julian Prégardien, Mathieu Lussier, Florian Heyerick, and Peter van Heyghen among others. She regularly collaborates with keyboardists Mark Edwards, Katelyn Clark, and Christophe Gauthier. Her début CD, Devienne Sonatas with Mark Edwards, was issued by Centaur Records in February 2019 and has been warmly reviewed by Early Music America and the American Record Guide.
She has a doctorate in historical performance from McGill University’s Schulich School of Music. Her research centres on the performing practices and repertoire of the French Flute School of the nineteenth century seen through the lens of period instruments. She addresses a wide repertoire, playing antique flutes by Tortochot (Paris, ~1770), Claire Godfroy l’aîné (Paris, ~1820), Jean-Louis Tulou (Paris, ~1841) and Isidore Lot (Paris ~1870).
Rachel Stroud is a baroque violinist, and in the final stages of a Ph.D. in Musicology at King’s College, Cambridge University. After graduating with a first-class degree from Cambridge in 2010, Rachel toured for a year with the European Union Baroque Orchestra before studying at the Royal Conservatory in the Hague with Walter Reiter and Kati Debretzeni. She now works professionally as a freelance violinist alongside her academic career, and has performed all over the world in countries ranging from Latvia to Argentina with orchestras such as Britten Sinfonia, OAE, Brecon Baroque, Ex Cathedra, Symphonie Atlantique, PRJCT Amsterdam and Les Passions de l’Ame. Her research interests include the roles of sociality, objects and agency in performance (particularly orchestral performance without a conductor), and she is currently investigating cultural and ethnographic approaches to notation and performance in Beethoven’s late string quartets. Rachel is a member of the period-instrument string quartet ‘The Eliot Quartet’, made up of the string principals of Symphonie Atlantique and whose name was inspired by the poet T.S Eliot’s profound ‘Four Quartets’. The quartet recently took part in a site-specific theatrical installation based on the music of Schubert in a fish factory in Scheveningen, and participated in an ethnographic project in collaboration with Utrecht University exploring the affordances of different media and notational sources in performance in 2017. Rachel was lead convenor of the Cambridge Interdisciplinary Performance Network between 2016 – 2018, curating a series of workshops and lectures ranging from theology and gender to the Indian Classical dance form ‘Odissi’, and in 2019 – 2020 will co-convene the interdisciplinary research network ‘Re’ at CRASSH, Cambridge exploring the concept of re-performance and the idea of the ‘original’. She has spoken, performed and led workshops at a variety of conferences in the Netherlands, England, France and Belgium and has been invited to take part in performance-led research projects at institutions such as the Royal Academy of Music, the Abbé de Royuamont in Paris, and the Orpheus Institute in Ghent. Rachel represents the voice of her generation of period performers on the Council of the Academy of Ancient Music, and plays on a baroque violin made by Jonathan Woolston which is on loan to her from Nigel Brown and the Stradivari Trust.