Musical Exploration featuring Emlyn Ngai, Baroque violin.

Emlyn Ngai, Artist Teacher at Hartt in violin and performance practice. He will present a program spotlighting the violin, the bow, playing technique, and the ways that composers wrote for the instrument during the Baroque period. Here is the description Emlyn has provided:

The violin has always been regarded as an instrument that could imitate the human voice with incredible realism and delicacy.  Since its early roots steeped in vocal music, the violin has been pushed to find its own realm of possibilities.  Drawing upon a rich dance music tradition as well as the instrument’s innate lyricism, composer-performers have created a wonderful body of works for unaccompanied violin that intertwines form and structure with lofty inventiveness.  This presentation will explore the evolution of violin playing and aesthetics changes in the 1600s and 1700s through works by J.S. Bach, Thomas Baltzar, Nicolas Matteis, Jr., Giuseppe Tartini, and Georg Philip Telemann.

Concertmaster of the Philadelphia Baroque Orchestra Tempesta di Mare, Emlyn enjoys a diverse life as both a modern and historical violinist. He holds degrees from McGill University, Oberlin College Conservatory, and the Hartt School.

World Records, and Telarc. His recordings for the label Musica Omnia have received acclaim in American Record Guide, BBC Music Magazine, Gramophone, and The Strad. Emlyn holds degrees from McGill University, Oberlin College Conservatory, and the Hartt School. His teachers have included Frona Colquhoun, Sydney Humphreys, Thomas Williams, Eugene Drucker and Philip Setzer. It was during his studies with Marilyn McDonald at Oberlin that he won first prize on baroque violin in the 1995 Locatelli Concours Amsterdam and appeared at the Teatro Donizetti in Bergamo with Ensemble Il Giardino Armonico and the Berliner Tage für Alte Musik.

An enthusiastic educator, Emlyn has taught at Boston University, Mount Holyoke College, and McGill University and has been a faculty member of Amherst Early Music, Madison Early Music Festival and the Oberlin Baroque Performance Institute. Currently he teaches modern and baroque violin, chamber music and performance practice at The Hartt School, where he also co-directs the Collegium Musicum.