Alamo Baroque Festival

St. Mark’s Episcopal Church is proud to announce it will host the Alamo Baroque Festival, as part of San Antonio’s official tricentennial celebrations, January 8-13, 2018. The Alamo Baroque Festival presents historically-informed performances of music from the 17th and 18th centuries by internationally recognized artists.

This six day festival will feature free public performances, master classes, and private instruction (by audition).

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Festival Partners

St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, The Royal Academy of Music (London), Trinity University, The University of Texas at San Antonio,Youth Orchestras of San Antonio, and Children’s Chorus of San Antonio.

Festival patron

This festival is underwritten by St. Mark's congregant Dr. Richard Butler, Professor Emeritus of Economics at Trinity University. Dr. Butler has performed early music since the 1960's, serving for more than a decade as Assistant Conductor and occasional soloist for The Cantata Singers of Boston and the Texas Bach Choir in San Antonio. He has sung in the Thomaskirche in Leipzig (Bach's church), and closer to home he once gave a concert of Bach cantata arias at St. Mark's with a period-instrument ensemble. He is excited to be able to help San Antonio become an early music mecca.

Festival Faculty

Margaret Faultless
Baroque Violin

Faultless is an internationally renowned specialist in historical performance practice, both as a violinist and a director. Performing music from Monteverdi to the present day, she is now best known as an interpreter of eighteenth-century repertoire.

Elizabeth Reed
Gamba and Baroque Cello

Reed teaches Baroque cello and viola da gamba at the University of California at Berkeley. She also teaches Baroque cello and viola da gamba at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where she is co-director of the Baroque Orchestra. Her playing has been described in the press as, “intense, graceful, and suffused with heat and vigor.”

Jacqueline Horner- Kwiatek
Soprano

Horner-Kwiatek, mezzo-soprano, was a member of the world-renowned vocal quartet Anonymous 4 from 2000-2015. She recorded twelve award-winning CD’s with the group, including American Angels that twice topped Billboard’s classical music charts, and The Cherry Tree, one of the top selling classical CDs of 2010.

Robin Tyson
Countertenor

As a concert soloist, Tyson has performed throughout Europe, USA and the Far East, with conductors such as Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Richard Hickox, Paul McCreesh, René Jacobs, Emmanuel Haïm, Stephen Cleobury and Joshua Rifkin, appearing at venues such as the Lincoln Center New York, Edinburgh International Festival, Suntory Hall Tokyo, City Hall Hong Kong, Spitalfields Festival, Barbican Centre and the BBC Proms.

Paul Phoenix
Tenor

Grammy Award-winning singer Paul Phoenix has extensive knowledge and experience in a variety of vocal styles and numerous languages. As an experienced vocal coach he has a particular interest in young and developing voices, in presentation, interview and audition technique. His skills as a mentor and in community engagement are exceptional.

Alex Ashworth
Bass

Alex Ashworth is a concert and opera singer, working around Europe and the United Kingdom. Alex studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London with Mark Wildman and Julius Drake. He has sung for Glyndebourne Festival Opera (Curio, Giulio Cesare), Scottish Opera on Tour, (title rôle Eugene Onegin), Welsh National Opera (Wozzeck, title role). Abroad, Alex has worked for Icelandic Opera (Silvio, I Pagliacci), Opera de Lille (Curio, Giulio Cesare) and the Opéra Comique in Paris (Otakar, Der Freischütz).

a Baroque Presence in San Antonio

San Antonio, steeped in history and increasingly well-connected internationally, is on the path to winning recognition as one of the world's great cities. The great cities of America and Europe -- from San Francisco and Boston to London and Vienna -- have a vibrant early music scene as a vital part of the rich cultural life that helps to make them great. We need to develop that early music culture as a part of our aspirations for the future of San Antonio.

Historically informed performances bring to their audiences a distinctive musical experience. Music of the 16th-18th centuries was written for instruments that sound and play differently than their modern counterparts, and it was performed by both instrumentalists and singers with technique and style quite distinct from the modern idiom. It is as if you were hearing even a familiar piece like Handel's Messiah for the first time.

Creating an early music culture means not just hosting occasional performances by visiting ensembles but the development -- from childhood on up -- of a cadre of local singers and instrumentalists devoted to historically informed performance. Our neighbors in Austin, Dallas and Houston have done this, and so must we. The inaugural Alamo Baroque Festival is the first step in making that vision a reality.

St. Mark's, with its long tradition of great music, its historic and acoustically appropriate nave, and its connections with the great musicians of Europe, is the logical "kernel" of that culture in San Antonio. And the festival, both in its public events and in its outreach to schools, etc., furthers the St. Mark's mission of feeding those who are hungry for knowledge, meaning, beauty and creativity.

A Place to Grow

St. Mark's Core Vocation

Feeding San Antonio with the Bread of Life