Artist Bios
La Musica
16th & 17th Century Music & Julie Kabat
Carol Plantamura, soprano, is Full Professor at the University of California, San Diego. She began her professional career with the Los Angeles "Monday Evening Concerts" under the direction of Pierre Boulez, and was a founding member of the Center for the Creative and Performing Arts at the State University of New York at Buffalo under the direction of Lukas Foss. Her primary performance interests are 17th and 20th Century vocal music. She founded the Five Centuries Ensemble, a group that specialized in seventeenth and 20th century music, performing with them for 14 years.
Ms. Plantamura has made more than a dozen recordings. She spent twelve years in Italy and performed in virtually all of the important concert venues in Europe as well as in Australia, New Zealand, Japan and the U.S. She was a founding member of Musica Elettronica Viva, Rome; Teatro Musica, Rome; 2e2m, Champigny (Paris); and performed many times with Nuova Consonanza, Rome, L'Ensemble Intercontemporain, Paris; as well as in opera houses and with symphony orchestras throughout Europe. She and Mr. Hübscher have made numerous concert tours since they first recorded together in 1977.
Jürgen Hübscher, lutenist, has enjoyed an extensive concert career as a soloist, permanent lutenist with Concentus Musicus of Vienna under Nlkolaus Harnoncourt, and duo partner with countertenor Paul Esswood and flutist Berhard Boehm. He has performed in the most important music festivals in Europe and the U.S.
Born in West Germany, Mr. Hübscher studied with Walter Gerwig and Michael Schäffer. After an intense three-year period during which he concentrated on the performance of avant-garde music, he resumed his studies at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis with Eugen Dombois, receiving diplomas in both renaissance and baroque lute performance. He taught lute and basso continuo at the Musikhochschule in Karlsruhe for 15 years, and now teaches at the Universität Mozarteum in Salzburg. He is founder and leader of the ensemble La Volta, a group of widely acclaimed young musicians that has performed in 14 countries.
Beverly Lauridsen (1945-1994), cellist, became the youngest member of the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Zubin Mehta at the age of nineteen. Her teachers included Piatigorsky, Nelsova and Navarra. She moved East in 1969, joined the Boston Symphony for their 1971 European tour, and served for several seasons as principal cellist of the Buffalo Philharmonic and the Brooklyn Philharmonic. Lauridsen performed extensively with chamber music groups such as L'Ensemble and the Caecilian Trio and performed with Jean-Pierre Rampal, Eugenia and Pinchas Zuckerman, Julius Baker and many others. She started playing viola da gamba in 1971.
Julie Kabat, composer and concert artist, has performed her music throughout the U.S., Canada and Japan. She has composed vocal, choral and chamber music as well as music for the theater, including a Samuel Beckett play presented by NOHO Theater Company in Japan and music for the Circle Repertory Theatre Company in New York.
In finding her own voice, Kabat has developed an individual style of singing, often in a language without words that brings us close to the world of dreams. She often accompanies her voice with an unusual array of homemade and ethnic musical instruments such as glass harmonium, musical saw and percussion. Her many one-woman performance art pieces combine music, theater, poetry and puppetry. For instance, Child and the Moon-Tree is a one-act opera for voice and computerized synthesizers with costumes and stylized choreography inspired by her studies of Noh Theater in Japan.
Kabat has composed many site-specific works, including a series of pieces that celebrate the earth and a sense of place, such as Navajo Mountain Song created with children on the Navajo Reservation and the Wild Sound Symphony for the Adirondack Park.
Since the late 1970's, Ms. Kabat has worked as a teaching artist at the cutting edge of arts in education. As a composer in the classroom, she focuses on the intersection of music and language, helping students read and write poems and stories which they set to music, so that everyone gets the chance to improvise and perform.
Ms. Kabat is Executive and Artistic Director of Concerted Effort, a nonprofit organization devoted to arts in education. With dancer Susan Griss, she co-directs the Arts and Curriculum Institute at Skidmore College (ACI), which offers professional development for elementary school teachers on how to use music, poetry and dance to teach children to read and write. She began studying music composition at age eleven with a professor at Brown University and went on to study with Hall Overton and Jacob Druckman, among others. Ms. Kabat earned a B.A. in philosophy (phi beta kappa) at Brandeis University.
Ben Hudson was for many years a freelance musician in New York. We have no current biographical information on him. (Incidentally, he played some orchestra jobs with the producer of this recording.)
