Artists

Equally accomplished on the modern oboe, he is principal of the Carmel Bach Festival, a position he held with the Buenos Aires Philharmonic and the New Century Chamber Orchestra. He’s a professor at The Juilliard School and his students fill the ranks of top groups across the country. Mr. Ruiz is featured on dozens of recordings, has earned a Grammy nomination and a Gramophone Award, and received the KQXR Record of the Year Award (NYC) as well as the ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming in contemporary music. He has performed more works by Bach than any oboist in history. In recent years he has concentrated on the guitar with a focus on jazz. Examples of his reeds are on permanent display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

He has also performed with The Bach Ensemble with Joshua Rifkin, the Spanish Baroque Orchestra RCOC and is member of the ensemble Ars Antiqua Austria and the Clemencic Consort. He has performed in many important festivals and concert halls in the United States including the Boston Early Music Festival, Carnegie Hall, Berkeley Festival, and Salt Lake City. Ilia Korol has also been featured on numerous CD recordings.

She has performed as concertmaster of Les Arts Florissants with William Christie and appeared with Orchester Wiener Akademie, the London Classical Players, and the Bach Collegium Japan. She was featured as soloist and concertmaster on the soundtrack of the Touchstone Pictures film Casanova, and accompanied soprano Renee Fleming on Late Night with David Letterman.

Ms. Roberts also teaches at the University of North Texas and the Oberlin Baroque Performance Institute and has given master classes at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, Indiana University, Eastman, the Cleveland Institute, Cornell, Rutgers, Minsk Conservatory, Leopold-Mozart-Zentrum Augsburg, Shanghai Conservatory, Vietnam National Academy of Music, and for the Jeune Orchestre Atlantique in France. Ms. Roberts made her solo debut at age 12 playing the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto with the Grant Park Symphony of Chicago. Her recording credits include Sony, CPO, and Deutsche Harmonia Mundi.

For three summers, Joel was a fellow of the Tanglewood Music Center, most recently as a member of its resident new-music quartet, the New Fromm Players. He has also spent summers at the Aspen Music Festival, the Encore School for Strings, the Indiana University String Academy and the Académie Musicale de Villecroze.

Born in San Bernardino and having spent his youth in the Pacific Northwest, he now resides in Altadena, California.

Ms. Strauss has performed with American Bach Soloists, Musica Pacifica, San Francisco Bach Choir, Magnificat, Camerata Pacifica, and Galanterie. She has performed at the Indianapolis Early Music Festival, Tage Alte Musik Regensberg, Brighton Early Music Festival, Renaissance and Baroque Society Pittsburgh, and Corona del Mar Bach Festival. She holds a Bachelor of Music degree in performance from the University of Southern California, is co-founder of the Los Angeles-based chamber ensemble Angeles Consort, and teaches privately in the Los Angeles area.

As an increasingly active baroque violist, Andrew has performed with Grand Harmonie, Les Bostonnades, Musicians of the Old Post Road, Harvard Baroque Chamber Orchestra, Musica Angelica, and San Diego Baroque Soloists, and is an alumnus the Tafelmusik Winter Institute (Toronto), the American Bach Soloists Academy (San Francisco) and the International Baroque Institute at Longy (Cambridge, MA). Having relocated to San Diego at the end of 2015, he is currently a teaching artist in the San Diego Youth Symphony’s Community Opus Project, and at SDSU’s Community Music School.

Ages ago, while a film major at UC Berkeley, she began the permanent switch from modern to baroque performance under the guidance of David Tayler and Elizabeth Blumenstock, and subsequently performed at the Berkeley Early Music Festival twice—including as a semifinalist in the American Bach Soloists International Young Artists Competition. At USC, she played in the Early Music Ensemble led by James Tyler while obtaining an MFA in screenwriting from the School of Cinematic Arts.

A devotional musician, or Bhaktin, by countless births, during the 2024-2025 performance season, Mr. Diggins, will be found, among other places, on stage with the Portland Baroque Orchestra as a soloist and principal (with both the violin and the viola d’amore), Musica Angelica, Musica Transalpina, Live Oak Baroque and the Sonoma Bach Choir, Baroque Music Festival Newport Beach, online as a teacher for Teach To Learn’s Culture Connect program, and, at Farmer’s Markets, Craft Faires, Weddings and other special occasions performing with his life partner and colleague, Jolianne Einem with their duo, The Flying Oms – String Duo Plus!

She can be heard on the Musica Omnia and Music & Arts labels, and recently recorded with the American Bach Soloists. She directed a Musica Angelica program in January and conducted the Saskatoon Symphony Orchestra in May. This summer, she joined the Orchester Wiener Akademie as principal cellist for a European tour of The Infernal Comedy with John Malkovich. She also joined them as principal cellist for a collaboration with the Vienna Boys Choir in August. She recently returned to Vienna to perform the gamba solos with the Wiener Akademie in a performance of the St. Matthew Passion at Musikverein.

https://www.alexahaynespilon.com/

Woodward performs with groups such as Tesserae, Musica Angelica, Los Angeles Master Chorale, Pacific Chorale, and Long Beach Symphony Orchestra. He has appeared at the Carmel Bach and San Luis Obispo Mozart Festivals, and is a regular performer at the Baroque Music Festival, Corona Del Mar. He plays a German cello built around 1720, maker unknown, and his viola da gamba is a John Pringle 2009 copy of an instrument by Henry Jaye of 1624.

An avid educator, she has been on collegiate and pre-college faculty at San Francisco Conservatory, and holds degrees from the University of Michigan and The Juilliard School. She is pursuing a DMA at SUNY Stony Brook. When not playing the harpsichord, Caitlyn enjoys going on adventures with her dog, a Great Pyrenees mix named Polyphony.

In 2019 she performed the role of Countess Almaviva in REDCAT's 12 hour endurance art piece, earning Mark Swed's acclaim as "one of the most astonishing performances, vocally and interpretively, I have ever encountered".

Other features include Long Beach Opera (Kate Soper's Voices from the Killing Jar), Musica Angelica (Purcell's The Fairy Queen), The Kennedy Center (Baljinder Sekhon premiere), LA Phil (Composer Fellowship Program, John Cage's Europeras 1 & 2), The Getty Museum (Steve Reich's Drumming), The Industry (Du Yun and Raven Chacon's Sweetland), LACMA Sunday Evening Concerts (Dominick Argento's Letters from Composers), The Box Gallery (Nice Day for the Races opera premiere), Monday Evening Concerts (John Sheppard's Media Vita, Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians), and The First Congregational Church, L.A. (Vivaldi's Gloria, Pergolesi's Stabat Mater, Fauré's Requiem, Vaughan Williams' Dona Nobis Pacem). A recent winner of the Beverly Hills National Auditions, she also regularly performs with chamber and vocal music ensembles across Los Angeles.

As an avid voice educator and co-founder of the educational organization, VoiceScienceWorks and the N.E.O. Voice Festival, she gives voice workshops at conferences and collegiate settings across the United States and Europe including the Pan-American Vocology Association, American Choral Directors Association, Acoustical Society of America, Harvard University, York University, College of the Holy Cross, California Institute for the Arts, University of California Los Angeles, and Cornish College of the Arts.

Laurel is an alumna of performance programs at the USC Thornton School of Music, New Music on the Point, Cortona New Music Sessions, Oregon State University, California State University L.A., and the Summer Vocology Institute.