The Peabody Trio - Collaborations

Baritone William Sharp is a consummate artist possessing the rare combination of vocal beauty, sensitivity and charisma. Praised by The New York Times as a "sensitive and subtle singer" who is able to evoke "the special character of every song that he sings," Mr. Sharp has earned a reputation as a singer of great versatility and continues to garner critical acclaim for his work in concerts, recitals, operas and recordings.

Mr. Sharp has appeared throughout the United States with major orchestras and music festivals. In recent seasons he has performed with the New York Philharmonic, St. Louis Symphony, San Francisco Symphony, National Symphony, New Jersey Symphony, and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. He is a frequent participant in Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart Festival, Aspen Music Festival, Colorado Music Festival and the Marlboro Music Festival. Mr. Sharp also enjoys his work in the performance of baroque and pre-baroque music. He has made numerous appearances with the Bach Aria Group, the Handel and Haydn Society, and the Maryland Handel Festival.

During the 2006-07 season Mr. Sharp performs as soloist with the Washington National Cathedral in Handel's Messiah and Bach's St. John Passion. He will also perform Bach's St. Matthew Passion and Mass in b minor with the Bethlehem Bach Festival, and returns to the Cathedral Choral Society as a soloist in Bach's Mass in b minor.

William Sharp's 2005-06 season engagements included appearances as soloist with the National Philharmonic in Brahms' Requiem, with the New York Festival of Song in Godmothers of Song, with the Cathedral Choral Society in Britten's War Requiem, and with the Bethlehem Bach Festival in various cantatas as well as Bach's Mass in b minor. Other appearances included programs of Schubert songs and works by John Musto at the Caramoor Festival, the world premieres of Scott Wheeler’s The Palace at 4 AM and David Froom’s Amichai Songs with the 21st Century Consort, and in Bach's St. John Passion with the Baldwin Wallace Bach Festival.

Mr. Sharp's 2004-05 season included return engagements at Tafelmusik, in which he sang concerts with Emma Kirkby, and the Bethlehem Bach Festival where he sang Bach's Mass in b minor and Cantata No. 106. He also sang a special presentation with the Vocal Arts Society at the Smithsonian Institute.

Mr. Sharp's concert highlights include Britten's War Requiem with the Boston University Symphony at Symphony Hall, and with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra both in Cincinnati and at Carnegie Hall (James Conlon conducting). He has also performed with the Boston Philharmonic in Mahler's Lieder Eines Fahrenden Gesellen, with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in works of Barber, Bernstein and Schickele, and with the New York Festival of Song in a gala performance celebrating their 15th Anniversary. He appeared with the Oregon Symphony in a program of Ives' songs, with the Boston Symphony Chamber Players in Boston and at Tanglewood singing Harbison's Words from Paterson, with Toronto's Tafelmusik performing works of Bach and Zelenka, and with the Fort Worth Symphony for Brahms' Ein Deutsches Requiem. He is a regular performer with the Bethlehem Bach Festival. Performances there have included St. John Passion, the Mass in b minor, selected cantatas, and Bach's Christmas Oratorio. Other Bach engagements include the St. Matthew Passion on a national tour with The Smithsonian Chamber Players and Bach's Mass in b minor at Bryn Mawr University with Helmut Rilling. He has appeared as soloist with the Da Camera Society of Houston for an evening of songs by Schumann, Brahms and Wolf, a program of songs by American composers, Schumann's Dichterliebe, and "Marcel Proust's Paris," a program of songs by French composers. Mr. Sharp has sung Handel's Messiah with Musica Sacra at Avery Fisher Hall and with the Vancouver Cantata Singers.

Mr. Sharp's other recent credits include John Adams' Nixon in China with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Brooklyn Philharmonic, David del Tredici's Gay Life with the San Francisco Symphony, Four Saints in Three Acts with the Mark Morris Dance Group at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and at Cal Performances in Berkeley, and Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, also with the Mark Morris Dance Group. Overseas he has performed Sam in Trouble in Tahiti with VARA Radio in the Netherlands, and Dandini in La Cenerentola at L’Opera de Nice.

William Sharp made his New York recital debut at the 92nd St. Y in 1983. In 1984 he made his Kennedy Center debut, followed by his Carnegie Hall recital debut in 1989. The Carnegie debut earned critical praise including that of Bill Zakariasen of the Daily News, who wrote that Mr. Sharp's "musicianship is right on the button, his knowledge of styles seems infinite, and he has an infectious sense of humor." William Sharp is the winner of the 1987 Carnegie Hall International American Music Competition.

William Sharp was nominated for a 1989 Grammy award for Best Classical Vocal Performance for his recording featuring the works of American composers such as Virgil Thomson, John Musto and Lee Hoiby on the New World Records label. He can also be heard on the 1990 Grammy award-winning, world premiere recording of Leonard Bernstein's Arias and Barcarolles on the Koch International label. Other recent recordings of Mr. Sharp's include the songs of Marc Blitzstein with The New York Festival of Song (Koch), J.S. Bach solo cantatas with the American Bach Soloists (Koch), and a collaboration with soprano Judith Kaye and pianist Steven Blier on Gershwin's Songs and Duets. Mr. Sharp has also recorded for Vox-Turnabout, Newport Classics, Columbia Records, Nonesuch and CRI.

Violist Maria Lambros has performed as a chamber musician throughout the world as a member of three of the country's finest string quartets in venues such as the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, London's Wigmore Hall, the Konzerthaus in Vienna, New York's Lincoln Center and Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall and the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. She was a member of the renowned Ridge String Quartet, which was nominated for the 1993 Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music Performance for their recording of the Dvorak Piano Quintets with pianist Rudolf Firkusny on the RCA label. The recording won Europe's prestigious Diapason d'Or in the same year. She was also a founding member of the Naumburg Award-winning Meliora String Quartet, which was Quartet-in-Residence at the Spoleto Festivals of the U.S., Italy and Australia, and which recorded Mendelssohn's Octet with the Cleveland Quartet on the Telarc label. She was most recently a member of the Mendelssohn String Quartet and currently performs with the New York based chamber ensemble, La Fenice.

Maria Lambros appears regularly at a number of major chamber music festivals, including those of Helsinki, Aspen, Vancouver, Santa Fe, Tanglewood, La Jolla, Caramoor, Norfolk, Rockport, Skaneateles, Chamber Music West, New York's Mostly Mozart Festival and the Chateau Series in Turin, Italy. She has performed with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, DaCamera Society of Houston, with flutist Paula Robison at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and has performed with the Peabody Trio and the Guarneri, Cleveland, Juilliard, Muir, Brentano, Borromeo, Colorado and Orion Quartets,among others.

Maria Lambros attended the Eastman School of Music, where she received the Performer's Certificate and earned a Master's degree in Humanities from New York University. A native of Missoula, Montana, she was named one of "Montana's Leading Artists and Entertainers of the 2oth Century," a millenial list highlighting the last 100 years of Montanans' exceptional contributions to art and culture. A devoted teacher, Ms. Lambros is currently a member of the chamber music faculty of the Peabody Conservatory of Music and has been on the faculties of the Conservatory of Music at Purchase College and Harvard University, among others. She is a faculty member of the Yellow Barn Music School and resides in Baltimore, MD, with her husband, cellist Michael Kannen and their son, Daniel.

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Elizabeth Mansfield has been working in theatre, television, film and radio, in the U.K., since the early 1970's. She has played many major and leading roles in regional theatres, and in London's West End, in plays, and in musical theatre. She has made over a hundred radio plays

for BBC Radio Drama, and was nominated 'Best Actress' in the Sony Radio Drama Awards in 1991.

She has developed her own work with collaborator Steve Trafford. Together they produced MARIE - The Story of Marie Lloyd, a solo music theatre piece, written for Mansfield, by Trafford. MARIE twice ran at the Fortune Theatre in London, and won Mansfield an Olivier Award nomination for 'Best Actress in a Musical', and in the London Critic's Awards. The show also toured to the U.S.A. and to Norway.

Their next collaboration, HYMN TO LOVE - Homage to Piaf, was produced in Colchester, in London, and at the Traverse Theatre, as part of the Edinburgh Festival in 1998, also, on BBC Radio 3.

Mansfield has her own theatre company Ensemble, and current projects include PORTRAITS IN SONG - Edith Piaf and Bertolt Brecht, devised by Mansfield and Trafford, which tours the UK, in 2002. Also, Love is a Stranger- Voices and Songs of Exile, devised by Mansfield, a solo theatre, performance piece, which premiered in Boulder, Colorado, USA in 2001, and which she plans to tour to the Edinburgh Festival 2002.

Elizabeth Mansfield is very thrilled to be collaborating with the Peabody Trio on Ludwig's Ghosts (working title), and to developing a new, exciting relationship between 'musician' and 'performer'.

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Charles Neidich mesmerizes the audience and critics the world over with performances which "surpass the limitations of the instrument." He is one of a rare breed of clarinetists who maintains a solo career, dividing his time between recitals, orchestra engagements and chamber music concerts. He has recently also undertaken the role of conductor. photo cretit: A. Zeininger

In recent years, Charles Neidich has become deeply involved in authentic performance practice using period instruments. In May 1994, he performed the Mozart Concerto in his reconstruction of the original version on a copy of a late eighteenth century basset clarinet on tour in Europe with Tafelmusik, in a highly successful debut at the Barbican in London. He has also developed recital programs where he combines performances of eighteenth and nineteenth century music on period instruments with performance of contemporary music on modern instruments.

Charles Neidich's repertoire of well over 200 solo works include pieces commissioned or inspired by him, as well as his own transcriptions. He has presented premieres of the twentieth century's leading composers such as William Schumann, Milton Babbitt, Ralph Shapey, Meyer Kupferman, Joan Tower and Edison Denisov.

A native New Yorker of Russian and Greek descents, Charles Neidich began clarinet studies with his father and piano with his mother. He continued his clarinet studies with the famed pedagogue, Leon Russianoff. Although quite active in music since childhood, Mr. Neidich decided against attending a music conservatory, but continued private lessons with Mr. Russianoff until graduating from Yale University with a Bachelor of Arts, cum laude, in Anthropology. In 1975, he became the first American to received a Fulbright grant to study in the U.S.S.R. He attended the Moscow Conservatory for three years studying with Boris Dikov and Kirill Vinogradov.

A winner of several top European prizes - including the 1982 Munich International Competition sponsored by the ARD - Mr. Neidich also won the first major clarinet competition in the U.S., the Walter W. Naumburg Competition (1985), an award which catapulted him into prominence as a soloist.

In addition to performing, Charles Neidich has a high profile as a teacher and is a member of the artist faculties of the Juilliard School, the Manhattan School of Music, and the State University of New York at Stony Brook. During the 1994/95 season he was a visiting Professor at the Sibelius Academy in Finland.

Recordings are available from Sony Classical, Sony Vivarte, Deutche Grammophon and Bridge Records.

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André De Shields is an actor, a director and an educator. He is currently generating critical acclaim in the Broadway production of Terence McNally's new musical The Full Monty in the role he originated at San Diego's Old Globe Theatre. In 2001, he received Tony, Drama Desk and Astaire photo credit: Lia Chang

Award nominations and won an Outer Critics' Circle Award for his performance in The Full Monty.

Mr. De Shields won an Emmy Award for his performance in the NBC television special presentation of Ain't Misbehavin', the role he created in the Fats Waller musical at the Manhattan Theatre Club and on Broadway, including the 1988 revival. However, he is probably best known for having created the title role in the Broadway musical The Wiz in 1975.

Mr. De Shields began his professional career in the Chicago production of Hair which led to a role in The Me Nobody Knows and membership in Chicago's Organic Theatre Company, where he created the role of Xander, the Unconquerable in Warp. He debuted on Broadway in Warp and has since starred in such shows as Jazzbo Brown, Just So, and L'Histoire Du Soldat at Carnegie Hall.

On the concert stage, Mr. De Shields performs Mood Ellington, an original one-man tribute to The Duke, directed and choreographed by Mercedes Ellington. Other concert stage performances include two productions with William Bolcom: as J.J. Fergesen in the cabaret opera Casino Paradise, and as the Rock Singer in Songs of Innocence and Experience (the St. Louis Symphony at Carnegie Hall and the BBC Symphony at Royal Festival Hall, London). He has toured with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center as Narrator for Igor Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat and Wynton Marsalis' A Fiddler's Tale and, in 1999, he served as narrator with the Peabody Trio for Aaron Jay Kernis' Le Quattro Stagioni dalla Cucina Futurismo (The Four Seasons of Futurist Cuisine).

Mr. De Shields was featured in the film Extreme Measures with Hugh Grant and made his film debut in 1988 as Sandor in the Empire pictures release Prison. His television credits imclude the NBC movie-of-the-week I Dream of Jeannie - 15 Years Later as Haji, King of the Genies; two PBS Great Performances: Alice in Wonderland (Tweedledum) and Ellington - The Music Lives On, Another World and Law and Order.

As an educator, Mr. De Shields is Adjunct Professor of Shakespeare at New York University in the Gallatin School of Individualized Study. He was the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr./Rosa Parks/Cesar Chavez Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

During the 1992-93 season, Mr. De Shields served as director of Carnegie Hall's Jazzed - an educational strategy for restoring the arts to the public schools.

Active in Actors' Equity Association, the labor union that represents stage performers, for five years, Mr. De Shields held a Principal Performer seat on Equity's national council; was a member of the Council's Eastern Regional Board and served as Chair of the union's Committee for Racial Equality.

A triple Capricorn and the ninth of eleven children born and reared in Baltimore, Maryland, Mr. De Shields received his B.A. in English from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, which honored him with "2001 The Person of the Year Award" from its New York Chapter Alumni Association; and his M.A. in African-American studies from New York University (Gallatin School of Individualized Study) where he also serves as adjunct professor.

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Roger Tapping (viola), born in 1960, was raised in Hampshire, England. He joined the Takács Quartet in 1995. He studied at

Cambridge University and the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin. His teachers included Margaret Major of the Aeolian Quartet and Bruno Giuranna. As a member ofthe European Community Youth Orchestra, a founding member of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, and frequent participant in Sandor Végh's International Musicians' Seminar in Cornwall, he has enjoyed performing with musicians of different nationalities and backgrounds for a very long time.

Before joining Britain's longest established string quartet, the Allegri, in 1989, Mr. Tapping performed with many of London's leading chamber ensembles, recorded several CDs and toured Mexico, Malaysia, and Sri Lanka under the auspices of the British Council.

He is married to Natasha Brofsky, cellist of the Peabody Trio. They have two daughters, Cordelia and Eleanor. They currently live in Boulder, Colorado where they enjoy cross-country skiing. They also love sailing in the Baltic Sea off the coast of Sweden.

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WALTER VAN DYK trained with Uta Hagen at the HB Studios in New York, and studied singing at Trinity College of Music, London. Most recent theatre includes: Banquo in Macbeth (TNT World Tour), Lucio

in Measure for Measure and Macbeth (Tour and Jeannette Cochrane Theatre), The Wigsmaster in the Original production of the Olivier Award nominated Enter the Guardsman (Donmar Warehouse), the UK Premiere Mischa Spoliansky's Send for Mr. Plim (BAC), A Christmas Carol (English Theatre Company), Isutzu and Dreaming of the Bones (Place Theatre), Pirelli in Sweeney Todd (Theatr Clywd), Heilbutt in What Now Little Man? (Greenwich Theatre), Gaston in the Olivier Award nominated La Traviata ( Tour Music Theatre London), and Tamino in The Magic Flute (MTL), Pacific Overtures (Leicester Haymarket), Snug in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Happy End, As You Like it (American Repertory Theatre, Cambridge, Mass. USA), Torvald in A Doll's House (Stadsschouwburg, Amsterdam), Henry the VIII A Man for All Seasons (Richmond), Article Five (King's Head), Anton Bruckner in Te Deum (Oxford), Sebastian in Twelfth Night, Hastings in She Stoops to Conquer, Romeo in Romeo and Juliet, Algernon in The Importance of Being Earnest, Simon in Hay Fever (Publick Theatre, Boston, Mass. USA), Oh!Coward (Duke of Cambridge), She Loves Me (Perth Theatre), Don Perlimplin in The Love of Don Perlimplin for Belisa in the Garden (Old Red Lion), A Kurt Weill Cabaret (Tour and Young Vic), The Clink (Paines Plough).

TV and Film includes: A Midsummer Night's Dream (PBS), Love Hurts (BBC), Framed (ITV), Can't Stop me Dreaming (BBC), Birds of a Feather (BBC), The Detectives (BBC), London's Burning (ITV), Incognito (Warner Bros.), Abbot's Approach (Long Island Bridie Films). Radio for BBC Radio Four include A Bit of Berlin, The Cinderella Service, Postcards from No Man's Land.

Narration work includes the UK premiere of Viktor Ullmann's The Love and the Lay of Cornet Christoph Rilke at the Wigmore Hall and Warwick Arts Festival. Dulwich International Chamber Music Festival, Alex Howard Dance Company Schoenberg's Ode to Napolean for Yellow Barn Festival in Vermont, USA, and IMS Prussia Cove, and Lichnowsky in Waiting for Beethoven at the Florestan Festival in Peasmarsh.