Dear Lute Listers,
if you happen to be in Germany next Weekend: The German lute society holds its annual festival this year in Frankfurt/Main. It starts on Friday, 10 June, with a recital of music by Bach and Weiss played by Vasily Antipov, a student of Yasunori Imamura at the Frankfurt University for Music and Performing Art, and graduate of the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory. Following, there will be evening concerts by Sigrun Richter (Lute Music of the Italian Renaissance) and Peter Croton (Bach and Zamboni) on Friday, by Anthony Bailes (Losy, St Luc, Biechteler) and the Frankfurt Renaissance Ensemble (playing compositions of German musicians on words from the Shir Hashirim/Song of Songs) on Saturday. In the afternoon of Sunday the festival ends with two recitals. One by Gabor Tokodi (Baroque guitar) playing Corbetta, the other by Suzanne van Os and Beate Dittmann playing Dowland, Francesco da Milano, Newsidler, Valdarrabano, and Vasquez. Peter Croton (who teaches at the Schola Cantorum in Basel) will hold a masterclass for lutenists and guitarists on Saturday and Sunday, and also on Saturday and Sunday Yvonne Adelmann will offer a singer's workshop centering around the lute air, especially Dowland and Campion, with Frank Adelmann offering lute coaching. There will be lectures by researchers, performers and teachers. Some of them will talk about subjects which are related to the town of Frankfurt, for example the "last lutenist" Johann Christian Gottlieb Scheidler, or Johann Daniel Mylius' lute book Thesaurus Gratiarum. Music manuscripts and prints from the collection of Matthias Schneider will be on show on Saturday. He owns some lute manuscripts and baroque guitar sources which are almost unknown to everybody outside the circle of his friends, and from which only two have hitherto appeared in facsimile. Instrument builders will show their lutes and guitars on Saturday and Sunday - a good opportunity to try out different instruments. For the children among us, and for those who have not forgotten that they once were children, there will be a puppet show on Saturday afternoon (Siggi the Little Knight - who turns down his fathers suggestion of pursuing the usual knightly career of fighting against dragons, beating up giants, and making the world tremble, in favour of playing the lute and befriending the dragon). Following that Suzanne van Os and Beate Dittmann present stories around the lute for little princes and princesses, and offer the opportunity to have one's first hands-on experience of such an instrument. The programme flyer is on www.lautengesellschaft.de | Veranstaltungen | Festival der Laute. Joachim Luedtke -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
