Lawrence Lipnik
Music Director Lawrence Lipnik performs and records with many acclaimed early music ensembles and is a founding member of the viol consort Parthenia and vocal ensemble Lionheart. In addition to performing, his busy teaching schedule has included early music performance instruction at Wesleyan University, collegium director at Amherst Early Music, national and international festivals including the Benslow Music Trust in the UK and Tibia Adventures in Music Recorder Workshop in Tuscany, Italy. He is currently co-director of the Viol Sphere 2 workshop in Arizona, Viols West Workshop, and Road Scholar National Early Music Workshop in California.
Recent performance highlights include concerts with lutenist Paul O’Dette of Dowland’s complete Lachrimae at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, concerts at the Venice Biennale and Berkeley Festival, appearances with the Venice Baroque Orchestra, Folger Consort, and ARTEK, as well as early opera residencies at Carnegie Mellon University. He is a contributor to The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Contemporary Dramatists, and The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare. Lawrence has been teaching at Bloom since 2008.
photo credit: Terry Gruber Contact Larry HERE.
Joan Kimball
Joan Kimball, a founding member of Piffaro and its artistic co-director for 40 years, has concertized with the ensemble throughout the U.S., Europe, and South America. Hailing from Philadelphia, Joan teaches recorder, early double reeds and bagpipes. She is on faculty at The Madison Early Music Festival, The Indiana Early Double Reed Workshop, Amherst Early Music, The San Francisco Early Music Recorder Workshop, and Hidden Valley Early Music Workshop.
In addition, she has collaborated with instrument maker Joel Robinson on the construction of medieval and Renaissance bagpipes, and makes double reeds for shawms, dulcians and capped winds. One of her specialties is refurbishing sets of krumhorns, replacing old plastic reeds with more authentic cane ones. With Bob Wiemken, she received Early Music America’s 2021 Howard Mayer Brown Award for Lifetime Achievement in Early Music.
Rainer Beckmann
German born recorder player Rainer Beckmann performs with a large variety of early music ensembles in the Philadelphia Tri-State area and is a founding member of New World Recorders and La Bernardinia Baroque Ensemble. Recent appearances include performances with Tempesta di Mare, The Clarion Orchestra, The Bach Choir of Bethlehem, Brandywine Baroque, Pennsylvania Sinfonia Orchestra and Vox Ama Deus.
Rainer teaches at Amherst Early Music workshops, coaches the recorder players of Temple University’s Early Music Ensemble, and serves as the music director of the Philadelphia Recorder Society. He is a graduate of the Utrecht Conservatory in the Netherlands where he studied recorder and historical performance practice with Heiko ter Schegget, Baldrick Deerenberg and Marion Verbruggen.