Music director, medievalist in musicology and recorder player, Pedro Memelsdorff was born in Argentina, graduated from the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis and the Sweelinck Conservatorium, and obtained a Ph.D. in Musicology from Utrecht University. He has been a member of Jordi Savall’s Hespèrion XX/XXI since 1981. He is the founder of Mala Punica, an ensemble that specializes in late medieval polyphony. The group has performed over 400 concerts in major early music venues in Europe and the United States and has issued eight CDs that have received over 40 international awards. Mala Punica have been Artists in Residence at the University of California, Davis, AMUZ in Antwerp, and the Fondation Royaumont in Paris, and have been Blodgett Distinguished Artists at Harvard University. Memelsdorff is also the founder of Arlequin Philosophe, a chamber orchestra specializing in French-Caribbean baroque repertoire.

Memelsdorff has been guest professor and lecturer at several music institutions in Europe, the Americas, and Asia, including the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, the Royal Academy of London, Harvard University, the Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina, Tel Aviv University, and the University of Tokyo. He has also lectured and taught at the New England Conservatory of Music and at conservatories in Jerusalem, Haifa, Cologne, Mainz, Bremen, Maastricht, The Hague, Copenhagen, Lyon, and Dublin. He has served as the Ernest Bloch lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, and has received a fellowship from Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Century for Italian Renaissance Studies. In 2020 he was invited as the Christoph Wolff Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Harvard University, and as Francesco De Dombrowski Visiting Professor at Villa I Tatti to research music in the late 18th-century French Caribbean.

He has served as a tenured professor of music at the Conservatory of Zurich and the Civica Scuola di Musica Claudio Abbado in Milan, as director of the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, and as artistic director of Festtage Alte Musik Basel.

Currently, Memelsdorff serves as a tenured professor at the Catalonia College of Music and as an affiliate researcher at the Université de Tours. Since 2006, he has served as tenured director of the Egida Sartori and Laura Alvini Early Music Seminars at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice.  In 2017 he was named artistic planner for musical events at Villa I Tatti. 

The Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO) is dedicated to maintaining live orchestral music and a full-scale symphonic orchestra as an integral part of the cultural and educational life of the New Orleans area, the entire state of Louisiana, and the Gulf South region. Formed in 1991, the LPO is the oldest full-time musician-governed and collaboratively-operated orchestra in the United States.

The LPO offers a full 36-week season with more than 120 performances, including classics, light classics, pops, education, family, park, and community engagement concerts in New Orleans and across multi-parish areas. In addition, The LPO collaborates with and provides orchestral support for other cultural and performing arts organizations, including the New Orleans Opera Association, New Orleans Vocal Arts Chorale, New Orleans Ballet Association, Delta Festival Ballet, Musical Arts Society of New Orleans, and the Historic New Orleans Collection.

As founder and artistic director of the award-winning OperaCréole, Givonna Joseph's research on operatic composers of African descent has been featured in the New Yorker, Southern Living, and NPR. She has been featured on Le Grand Tour, a documentary for French TV, and on the radio program Music Inside Out with Gwen Thompkins. Her company, OperaCréole, has received a wards from Gambit magazine's Tribute to the Classical Arts, the Coalition for African Americans in the Performing Arts, and the Louisiana Creole Research Association. Since 2011 Joseph has worked alongside her daughter, OperaCréole cofounder Aria M. Mason, to successfully mount lost or underperformed operas by composers of color, such as Samuel Coleridge Taylor's Thelma and Lucien Lambert's La Flamenca. In 2018 they created an original opera, Les Lions de la Reconstruction, in honor of the tricentennial of New Orleans's founding.

OperaCréole was founded in 2011 by the mother-and-daughter team of Givonna Joseph and Aria Mason and is dedicated to researching and performing lost or rarely presented works by composers of African descent. This year marks their 15th anniversary! This award-winning nonprofit specializes in works by 19th-century New Orleans free composers of color and works that promote Louisiana’s Creole language and culture. OperaCréole’s groundbreaking work includes the 2017 production of the lost opera La Flamenca (1903), by Lucien Lambert, and the 2025 tri-city premiere and production of Edmond Dédé’s grand opera, Morgiane. Their recent recording of Morgiane, in partnership with Washington, DC-based Opera Lafayette, is forthcoming. Most recently, OperaCréole has been featured in a Cash App Communities commercial. In addition to mounting its own productions, OperaCréole regularly performs in collaboration with local cultural institutions and at regional festivals and conferences. The ensemble presents historically themed concerts, educational presentations, and speaking engagements. Since 2011, OperaCréole has received numerous awards for contributions to the operatic sphere. In 2017, cofounders Givonna Joseph and Aria Mason were named among Southern Living’s Southerners of the Year.

A native of South Korea, Hyunkun Cho graduated from Korea National University of Arts before entering Berlin University of the Arts. In Berlin, he studied baroque cello with Markus Mollenbeck and chamber music with Mitzi Meyerson. At Catalonia College of Music in Barcelona, he continued his historical cello studies with Bruno Cocset and Emmanuel Balssa and his chamber music studies with Pedro Memelsdorff. He earned a specialized degree at Geneva University of Music. 

Cho has been a laureate of numerous competitions, both as a soloist and as a member of various ensembles. Those competitions include the International Telemann Competition (2013), the Berliner-Bach Competition (2013), the York Early Music Competition (2013), the Yamanashi International Competition for Early Music (2014), and the International Competition Musica Antiqua at MA Festival Brugge (2014). With his new ensemble Chorda Elegans he was awarded first prize, audience prize, and best interpretation prize at the 2018 Berliner-Bach Competition. In 2019, Cho was awarded first prize, audience prize, and special prize at the International Telemann Competition.

Markéta Cukrová began her musical career as a member of the world-famous children's singing choir Bambini di Praga. As a child, she also studied piano and flute. After graduating from Charles University in Prague, she entered the State Conservatory in Bratislava, Slovakia, to pursue a career in voice under Marie Urbanova.

Since 1992, Cukrová has been a member of early music projects throughout Europe, both as a soloist and with ensembles like Collegium 1704, Musique des Lumieres, and Mala Punica. She regularly appears at a wide variety of festivals, including December Nights of Sviatoslav Richter, Toujours Mozart, New Wave, Prague Premiers, MA Festival Brugge, Tropical Baroque Music Festival, Festival de La Chaise-Dieu, and Vienna's Musikverein Festival. Cukrova continues to enrich her repertoire by performing chamber songs of Classical, Romantic, Impressionist and 20th-century composers alongside works such as Monteverdi's L'Orfeo and Handel's Rinaldo. She has appeared on and recorded for Czech, French, Italian and Polish radio and TV.

Versatile French harpsichordist Jean-Christophe Dijoux performs repertoire from the 16th to the 21st centuries. He studied historical keyboards (harpsichord, clavichord, and fortepiano) at the Paris Conservatory and earned degrees at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis and the University of Music Freiburg, where he was named chair of the department for Historically Informed Performance in 2020.

Dijoux won first prize in the harpsichord category at the 2014 Leipzig International Johann Sebastian Bach Competition. He has also won prizes at the International Telemann Competition and, with flutist Anne Freitag, at competitions in L'Aquila and San Ginesio. As soloist or as collaborator in ensembles such as Les Talens Lyriques, Bach Collegium Japan, the Balthasar-Neumann Ensemble, and Le Parlement de Musique. He has performed at prominent festivals including Bachfest in Leipzig, the Klavier-Festival Ruhr in Cologne. the Magedeburg Telemann Festival, and the Auvers-sur-Oise Festival. He released his first solo CD, Varietas, in 2016.

American soprano Claron McFadden is a graduate of the Eastman School of Music and lives in the Netherlands. Her opera debut was in the Holland Festival's 1985 production of Johann Adolph Hasse's L'Eroe Cinese, conducted by Ton Koopman. In 1986, she made her debut with composer William Christie in Jean-Philippe Rameau's Anacreon, with the Opera Lyrique du Rhin. Since then she has worked extensively with Christie touring widely in the United States, South America, and Europe. Her debut at the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence was with Christie in a controversial production of Rameau's Les Indes Galantes. Her Covent Garden debut, also under Christie, was the Graham Vick production of Henry Purcell's King Arthur. She has also worked with other notable opera directors and conductors including Pier Luigi Pizzi in a production of Rameau's Castor et Pollux.
She was invited by Fabio Biondi to sing the title role in Francesco Cavalli's La Didone at Venice's La Fenice opera house. In the field of oratorio, she has worked with conductors such as Jos van lmmerseel and Frans Bruggen. Also distinguished in the field of contemporary music, she has appeared in works as diverse as Francis Poulenc's Dialogue des Carmelites, Leonard Bernstein's Candide, and Carl Orff's Carmina Burana.

McFadden is a regular guest at the BBC Proms and the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra and has often performed with jazz musicians, such as the Jazz Orchestra of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw.

A native of Ourense, Spain, Belén Vaquero is a 2019 graduate of Catalonia College of Music, where she earned a Historically Informed Performance Singing Degree with honors under Francese Garrigosa. Vaquero is a member of various early music ensembles. With Mala Punica, she has explored Italian 14thcentury music, performing music of composers such as Johannes Ciconia and Matteo da Perugia. As a member of Arlequin Philosophe, she has explored 18th-century French-Caribbean music. With Dichos Diabolos, she performed Spanish and Mexican music at Festival de Musique Baroque d'Ambronay, Echoes Festival, and MA Festival Brugge. With the Ministers of Pastime, she recorded several cantatas of Alessandro Scarlatti. With the ensemble Joan Brudieu, she has sung at the Festival Renaixement, Bachcelona, and Festival de Musica Amiga dels Pirineus.

Vaquero was awarded Fondazione Giorgio Cini scholarships for three consecutive years to attend the Seminari di Musica Amica, where she studied with early music specialists in musicology and singing. The Fundacio Victoria de los Angeles awarded her a scholarship to further her vocal studies.

Jonathan Woody is a versatile and dynamic musician who maintains an active schedule as a performer and composer in New York and across North America. Woody is in demand as a bass-baritone soloist, appearing regularly with historically informed orchestras including Boston Early Music Festival, Apollo’s Fire, Pacific MusicWorks, Bach Collegium San Diego, Trinity Baroque Orchestra, and New York Baroque Incorporated. In the 2021–22 season, he served as artistic advisor for the Portland Baroque Orchestra, curating a program of seventeenth-century German music for voices and orchestra. An accomplished chamber musician, Woody often performs as a member of the Grammy-nominated Choir of Trinity Wall Street, where he has earned praise from the New York Times for his “charismatic” and “riveting” solos. He has also recently performed in collaboration with Kaleidoscope Vocal Ensemble, Les Délices, Seraphic Fire, Byron Schenkman and Friends, and Tenet Vocal Artists. As a sought-after new music proponent, Woody has participated in premiere performances of several leading composers’ works, including Ted Hearne’s The Source (2014), Ellen Reid’s Prism (2019 Pulitzer Prize winner), Missy Mazzoli’s Breaking the Waves (NYC premiere, 2018), and Du Yun’s Angel’s Bone (2017 Pulitzer Prize winner).

In recent seasons, Woody has appeared at the Staunton Music, Portland Bach, Carmel Bach, and Oregon Bach Festivals, the American Bach Soloists Academy, and at the Aldeburgh Festival. He has also been seen on the operatic stages of Opera Lafayette, American Opera Projects, and Beth Morrison Projects. He is committed to racial equity in the field of the performing arts and currently serves on Early Music America’s Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access Task Force. Presently living on traditional Lenape lands now known as Brooklyn, New York, he holds degrees from McGill University and the University of Maryland, College Park.

Paul Morton began his music studies with his father. After a youthful education in folk music, he focused on classical guitar. Attending the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, he studied lute with Richard Savino and continua with Corey Jamason. He then completed studies in historical performance practice under the tutelage of Daniel Swenberg and Charles Weaver at the Juilliard School. Morton has become a plucked instrument specialist practicing disciplines from the European Renaissance to modern Americana. He now appears regularly throughout North America as a baroque continua player, performing both the lute and theorbo (a member of the lute family with an extended neck-often as much as six feet). Morton regularly performs with Ruckus, New Vintage Baroque, the Chivalrous Crickets and the Baroque Chamber Orchestra of Colorado as a baroque
continuo musician.

Laurent Dubois is the John L. Nau III Bicentennial Professor of the History and Principles of Democracy at the University of Virginia, and Academic Director of the Karsh Institute of Democracy. He was on faculty from 2007 to 2020 at Duke University, where he was a professor of Romance Studies and History, co-director of the Haiti Laboratory, and founder and director of the Forum for Scholars and Publics.

Dubois has written about the Age of Revolution in the Caribbean in Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (2004) and A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804 (2004), which won the Frederick Douglass Prize among other honors. His Haiti: The Aftershocks of History (2012) was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. He has also written about the politics of soccer, in Soccer Empire: The World Cup and the Future of France (2010) and The Language of the Game: How to Understand Soccer (2018).

His book The Banjo: America's African Instrument (2016) was supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Humanities Fellowship, and a Mellon New Directions Fellowship. His most recent book is Freedom Roots: Histories from the Caribbean (2019), coauthored with Richard Turits. His writing has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, the Nation, the New Republic, the New Yorker, the New York Times, Slate, and Sports Illustrated.