Artist(s)

STEPHEN STUBBS
Stephen Stubbs, born in 1951 in Seattle (US), has been engaged in music making since early childhood. Parallel interests in new and pre-romantic music led him to take a degree in composition at university and to study the lute and the harpsichord. Further years of study in Holland and England preceeded his professional debut as lutenist in 1976 at the Wigmore Hall, London. Since 1980 he has lived in North Germany, where he is a professor of lute and performance practices at the Hochschule der Künste in Bremen.

With his direction of Stefano Landi’s La morte d’Orfeo at the 1987 Bruges Festival, Stephen Stubbs began his career as opera director and he simultaneously founded the ensemble Tragicomedia, which has since recorded over twenty CD’s and completed tours of Europe, North America and Japan.

He has been invited for opera productions in several European countries and Scandinavia, most recently directing Monteverdi’s Orfeo at the Netherlands Opera in Amsterdam. To expand his repertoire into the late baroque period, Stubbs has recently founded the baroque orchestra Teatro Lirico.

TEATRO LIRICO
Lutenist Stephen Stubbs, co-founder and co-director of Tragicomedia,
has been a leader in the field of seventeenth century music for the last decade.
As soloist, accompanist, ensemble leader and director, he has explored every corner of the field of baroque music. Increasingly, operas of this period have been at the centre of his interests, directing stage performances of the three Monteverdi operas, as well as planned stagings of Luigi Rossi’s Orfeo for the Boston Early Music Festival, in Tanglewood and in Drottningholm.

The logical step in realising his passion for baroque opera was the establishment of an orchestra, dedicated to opera from the early baroque (Purcell, Lully, Cavalli a.o.) to the late baroque (Händel, Vivaldi, Rameau a.o.). This has led to the foundation of Teatro Lirico, that made its recording debut with a selection of Venetian love duets, arias and chamber music from Monteverdi to Vivaldi.

Recent concerts have been at the Händel Festspiele Karlsruhe, with the forenamed program, and at the Dresdner Festspiele, with a performance of Antonio Sartorio’s Orfeo. Teatro Lirico is recording exclusively for Challenge Classics.

LUCIA SWARTS
Lucia Swarts studied with Anner Bijlsma and Lidewij Scheifes at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, where she acquired her solo degree in 1985. In the same year she gave a debut recital in the Amsterdam Concertgebouw in the series New Vintage for talented young musicians.

Lucia Swarts specialized in chamber music, both on modern and on baroque cello. She is first cellist in the Baroque Orchestra of the Netherlands Bach Society and forms a duo with harpsichord player Siebe Henstra. She is a member of the Chromatic Quartet and Quartetto Amsterdam, and she frequently plays in ensembles for contemporary music, such as the Schönberg Ensemble and the Nieuw Ensemble.
In June 1996, at the Holland Festival, she was one of the solo players in the opera A King, riding by Klaas de Vries. She worked with baroque specialists like Gustave Leonhardt, Ton Koopman and René Jacobs, but also with specialists in modern music like Reinbert de Leeuw and Oliver Knussen, performing in many CD’s, radio and television recordings.

Lucia Swarts teaches at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague and at the Conservatory of Groningen. She also gives courses in The Netherlands and abroad, including the annual Festival of Ancient Music in Daroca (Spain).

Composer(s)

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