SAXTONS RIVER — Main Streets Arts ushers in the holiday season with a benefit concert by Cameo Baroque on Saturday, Dec. 1, at 7:30 p.m.
With a theme of “Wintertide,” the four-piece group will offer music by English, Italian, and German composers such as William Boyce, Antonio Caldara, Georg Philipp Telemann, George Frideric Handel, and Tomaso Albinoni.
Members of the New Hampshire–based quartet performing on period instruments are Beth Hilgartner, recorder and voice; Leslie Stroud, traverso (Baroque flute); Ernie Drown, harpsichord; and Laurie Rabut, viola da gamba.
As described in a news release for the event, Cameo Baroque is known for performances of interesting transcriptions by Hilgartner of works originally written for voices of other instrumentation. As an example, the Caldara pieces to be performed in the concert are instrumental transcriptions of arias from his opera Apollo in Cielo.
Hilgartner studied recorder with Eric Haas in Boston after an early start in piano and oboe. She works as a recorder maker in addition to her vocation as an Episcopal priest and her avocations of writer, gardener, equestrian, and knitter.
Drown grew up in central Vermont and has been the music director at the Church of Christ at Dartmouth College since 1999. He studied organ with Lenora McCroskey and John Ferris and harpsichord with John Gibbons. He teaches piano and organ privately and collects and repairs antique fountain pens when not at the piano bench.
Stroud is a California native who graduated from the Peabody Conservatory of Music. An orchestral and chamber musician, she says she is “dedicated to bringing audiences music ranging from that of the 18th and 19th centuries played on historic period flutes to adventurous works by composers of our own time on modern-day flutes.”
She has performed widely throughout New England and beyond and is a founding member of Cameo Baroque. She has taught extensively and maintains a private studio in the Upper Valley.
The newest member of Cameo Baroque is Laurie Rabut, a recent newcomer to Rockingham. She received her formal music training and degree from the Boston University School of Fine and Applied Arts and did further study, including baroque violin and viol, at the Baroque Performance Institute at Oberlin and at Cornell.
She has performed with the Greenwood Consort, Parthenia, the Boston Camerata, Boston Baroque, Apollo Ensemble, and the Arcadia Players, and she currently performs with a variety of ensembles in the New York and New England region.
Rabut has taught for Amherst Early Music, Pinewoods, and the Viola da Gamba Society. She teaches in the Five College Early Music Program in Western Massachusetts.