new album out!
In celebration of the 150th anniversary of Karl Goldmark’s landmark opera, The American Romantics present
The Queen of Sheba Suite, featuring new chamber orchestra arrangements of prominent ballets, choruses, and arias from the opera.
Available on streaming platforms
Stream the concert film at the link above!
The American Romantics
The American Romantics were founded in 2017, inspired by the extraordinary and forgotten artistry of musicians from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Working closely with the Yale Collection of Historical Sound Recordings, our performers uncover the stylistic performance practices of the Romantic-era through intensive research into archival documents, treatises, and early sound recordings of the time period. Following these discoveries, we offer concert programs and recording projects that invite the audience's imagination to travel back in time to enjoy the music of the 19th and early 20th centuries, with new perspectives on the aesthetics of a past time period.
The American Romantics are also dedicated to fostering scholarly community focused on Romantic-era performance, hosting "pub sessions" that have brought members together from over a dozen countries, reflecting the growing international community of scholars and performers specializing in 19th and early 20th century performance practice. These sessions provide a unique, collaborative environment for discussing research, sharing insights, and promoting the academic study and practical application of historical performance practices. www.americanromantics.org
Kevin Sherwin, Artistic Director
Conductor Kevin Sherwin infuses his active concert schedule with scholarly work in performance practice, focusing on orchestral styles of the Romantic-era. He recently debuted at Carnegie Hall's Weill Recital Hall conducting the Mahanaim Orchestra, and has performed as guitarist at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the University of Cambridge Summer Music Festival, La Grua Center, and others. Along with co-founding The American Romantics, he serves as Associate Artistic Director of the American Baroque Orchestra. He has presented his scholarly work at the University of Oxford, the Jacobs School of Music, the Mannes School of Music, the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, and others. As well, he has written articles on performance practice for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Charles Ives Society, and the Yale Collection of Historical Sound Recordings. He is an Associate Fellow at Timothy Dwight College, Yale University. www.kevinsherwin.com
Laura Hamilton, concertmaster
Laura Hamilton was Principal Associate Concertmaster for the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, where she led hundreds of performances over a tenure of 33 years. She was concertmaster for many of the MET's popular “Live in HD” videocasts, including Carmen, Parsifal, Turandot, Faust, Salome, and Madama Butterfly. Previously a member of the Chicago Symphony, she appeared with that orchestra as concerto soloist with Maestro Georg Solti. Her first orchestral position was with the New Jersey Symphony, where she was Principal Second Violinist for two years. Laura is currently Artistic Director and Concertmaster for the summer festival Classical Tahoe in Incline Village, Nevada, as well as Concertmaster for CityMusic Cleveland. As a chamber musician, she has performed with Berkshire Bach and other New England festivals including Marlboro, Manchester, and Bard; in summer festivals in Norway and Greece; and on the Met Chamber Ensemble series at Carnegie Hall. She appeared as guest concertmaster for the Seattle Symphony, the American Symphony Orchestra, the Welsh National Opera, and the Adelaide Symphony in Australia. In 2014, while on leave from the MET, Laura served for one season as concertmaster at the Sydney Opera House. A highlight of her Sydney experience was a gala concert with famed tenor Jonas Kaufmann; her rendition of Massenet's Meditation from Thais garnered rave reviews praising her “radiant,” “serenely beautiful interpretation.”
Mark Bailey, artistic advisor
Conductor Mark Bailey is extensively involved in the performance practice of baroque, classical, and romantic era musical works, with special emphasis on the repertoire of Eastern Europe. As director of the Yale Collection of Historical Sound Recordings, Mr. Bailey often is invited to give seminars on performance practice, conducting technique, Slavic baroque music, and the musical significance of early sound recordings, which he has at the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center, the Tafelmusik Baroque Summer Institute in Toronto, Canada, the University of Oregon, Indiana University, the University of Surrey, the University of Oxford, among others. Other guest appearances include conducting two gala concerts by invitation at Carnegie Hall, featuring the music of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Mark Bailey's recordings have been acclaimed by The New York Times critics’ choice list and praised by National Public Radio’s Performance Today. He has guest conducted ensembles including Portland Baroque Orchestra, Edmonton Symphony Orchestra, Cappella Romana, Pro Coro Canada, and others. As a baroque violist, Mr. Bailey has played in the Musica Vera Duo with Kevin Sherwin, include sold-out concerts at the University of Cambridge. Recent recordings with the American Baroque Orchestra include “Little Liberia: Music from Their Front Porch” and “Memories of Eastern Europe.” Their recent album, “Melodrama,” features 19th century works performed through the exploration of Romantic-era performance practices.
About Us
The American Romantics
The American Romantics are dedicated to the performance of Romantic-Era music through research into the performances practices of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
For more information, click here.
The Conductor on Early Film: Coordinating Romantic-Era Expression
Video Presentation
Presented by AR Principal Conductor Kevin Sherwin, given at:
University of Oxford: Transforming C19 HIP (TCHIP) Conference
Indiana University Jacobs School of Music Historical Performance Conference
The advent of the motion picture camera in the 1880s enabled the creation of films that revealed the musical interaction between romantic-era conductors and their orchestras. These video documents especially convey the gestural style that conductors relied on to enable particular stylistic elements of the period, such as tempo rubato, in a consistent and reliable manner.
This presentation will explore, discuss, analyze, and provide historical film samples that exhibit characteristics linked to nineteenth-century performance practices of Romantic-era repertoire. These early films of orchestral performance show conductors using distinctive gestural styles to lead orchestras with a decisively coordinated flexibility of tempo, intricate synchronization of agogic accents, and audible portamento. The highlighted conductors will include Leo Blech, Willem Mengelberg, Arthur Nikitsch, Dean Dixon, Heitor Villa-Lobos, and Erich Kleiber. The featured orchestras will include the Royal Philharmonic, the Berlin Philharmonic, the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, and the Berlin State Opera Orchestra.
Furthermore, the presentation will discuss how such visual representations link to written accounts on orchestral performance practice of the late nineteenth century, including “On Conducting” by Richard Wagner and “Brahms in the Meiningen Tradition,” edited by Walter Blume, as well as more recent research on Romantic-era performance practice by scholars such as Robert Philip and Clive Brown. In this way, these examples of historical footage serve as distinctive resources that can contribute to the revitalization of orchestral aesthetics and performance practices during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.