Asteria,
a vocal duet with lute specializing in Renaissance music, will be the next
presentation in the Saint Vincent College Concert Series at 8 p.m. Saturday, Feb.
23. The location of the concert, originally scheduled in the Performing Arts
Center of the Robert S. Carey Student Center, has been moved to the Saint
Vincent Basilica Crypt (lower church).
The duo is comprised
of the husband and wife team of Eric Redlinger (tenor and lute), and Sylvia
Rhyne, (soprano). Their
program will consist of Renaissance love songs. Redlinger is an expert in early
music, and Rhyne has starred on Broadway.
Asteria
burst onto the national Early Music scene in 2004, winning Early Music
America's first Unicorn Prize for Medieval and Renaissance Music with a
performance heralded by the New York
Times as "intimate and deeply communicative...meltingly
beautiful." This engaging duo brings out the passion and emotional impact
of late medieval vocal and instrumental music with timeless love songs of wide
appeal, transporting their listeners back to the age of chivalry. Redlinger's
skill on the lute and sweet tenor voice are complemented by his expertise in
early music, earned through study at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis and
extensive archival research into original sources in the European musical
archives of the Hague, Basel and Marburg. Rhyne brings to the partnership not only her quicksilver
soprano but also a strong dramatic connection with the audience, gained from a
professional career in musical theater. She has starred internationally as
Christine in "The Phantom of the Opera," and on Broadway as Joanna in
"Sweeny Todd" under the direction of Harold Prince, Susan Schulman
and Stephen Sondheim. Further information about the duo is available at www.nueva.asteriamusica.com
Admission
is $25 for adults and $15 for non-Saint Vincent students. Tickets may be
purchased online at http://concertseries.stvincent.edu, by calling 724 805-2565, or at the
door on concert evenings.
A
dinner concert package, A Classic Evening at Saint Vincent, is offered for $50
with advance reservations.
The
final two concerts in the 2012/2014 season will be Tempesta di Mare –
Philadelphia Baroque Chamber Players, March 2; and Veit Hertenstein, viola,
April 20.
The
Saint Vincent College Concert Series receives state arts funding support through
a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a state agency funded by the
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal
agency. These grant funds are administered in this region by the Pennsylvania
Rural Arts Alliance.