CONDUCTOR

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Andrew Bruhn is the Director of Choral Activities at Illinois State University, where he conducts Concert Choir, Belle Voix (advanced treble), and teaches conducting. A versatile musician, He has worked as a professional choral conductor, educator, composer, church musician, and trumpeter. His teaching at the middle school, high school, and collegiate levels has earned him various awards and recognitions. His school choirs regularly received superior ratings in organizational contests,  one of which was a featured performer at the Illinois Music Education Conference. Andrew received his Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Choral Music from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, his Master of Sacred Music degree in choral conducting from Luther Seminary and St. Olaf College, and a Bachelor of Music in Trumpet Performance from Wheaton College. A prolific composer, his music is published by many major publishers. He won the 2017 Illinois American Choral Directors Association (ACDA) Composition Contest and has been a finalist in other national composition contests. Andrew loves spending time with his wife, their two daughters, and their golden retriever.

Celina Boldrey has appeared regularly on Early Music Missouri’s Concert Series, in large and small ensembles. She received the B.Mus. in violin performance from Oberlin Conservatory and the M.Mus. in violin performance and Suzuki Pedagogy from Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville where she studied with John Kendall. Celina performs throughout the region, playing both modern and Baroque violins and violas in chamber concerts and recitals. In addition to multiple performances with Early Music Missouri, her Early Music work includes appearances with Armonia e Passione, Early Music St. Louis, Shakespear’s Band, Musicke’s Cordes, the Kingsbury Ensemble, St. Louis Baroque and Collegium Vocale. In recent seasons, Celina has performed a wide range of Baroque violin repertoire as a featured soloist with Early Music Missouri chamber ensembles in concerts and workshops. A popular and busy Suzuki teacher, Celina has served as co-director of the Greater St. Louis Suzuki Association and remains in high demand as an instructor and clinician at Suzuki workshops and institutes across the country. In addition to her Suzuki work, Celina maintains a private studio for violinists and violists of all ages and experience.

Polly Purcell Brecht is a native of Galesburg, Illinois. She moved back to the area last year from Nashville, Tennessee, where she was a Professor at the Blair School/Vanderbilt and Organist/Music Associate at Westminster Presbyterian, Nashville, where she served for over 30 years. She currently teaches at Bradley University and serves as organist at Westminster Presbyterian, Peoria. She received degrees in piano, organ, and harpsichord performance from Indiana University and Florida State University, with additional studies at Oberlin, University of Houston, and the Eastman School. She also holds the performer’s certificate in organ performance and was a finalist in many competitions, including the Detroit AGO Nationals. Prior to her positions in Nashville, Polly was a tenured professor at Middle Tennessee State University for over 10 years. In addition she has served many churches in Tennessee, Florida, Houston, Indiana, and Illinois. She has extensive experience in solo and collaborative work on piano, organ, and harpsichord. On the Peoria Bach Festival 2024 she will be giving a solo organ concert on Sunday, June 2 at 4:00 pm and play continuo on the Thursday noon concert.

Blake Duncan has enjoyed a varied career as an oboist, English Horn player, organist, choir director, a performer of early music and teacher in Illinois for the past 30 years. He is currently a member of the music faculty at Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville, IL. He performs as a regular member of the St. Louis based Baroque ensemble Collegium Vocale, as Principal Oboe with the Edwardsville Symphony Orchestra, and as an active free-lance musician on early and modern instruments. Previously, he served as an affiliate faculty member in the Music Department at Bradley University for 17 years, teaching double reeds, music appreciation, music technology and as director of the early music Collegium Musicum before his retirement. He also served on the faculty as oboe instructor, chair of the woodwind department, director of the Collegium Musicum and as a member of the Moveré Woodwind Quintet for the Lutheran Summer Music Program for 15 years and has been a member of the Illinois, Peoria and Cedar Rapids IA Symphony Orchestras. A long-time opera enthusiast, Blake served as the Chorusmaster, Orchestral Personnel Manager and as both a chorister and an oboist for Opera Illinois and the Sugar Creek Opera. He was a founding member of the Peoria Bach Festival Orchestra and continues to perform with this ensemble. He was also a member of the Columbus, Ohio based early music ensemble The Early Interval as well as the WiZARDS!, a Double Reed Quartet in the 2000’s, with whom he participated in several recordings, all of which are still available from Crystal Records. Blake began his Early Music studies when still an undergraduate at New England Conservatory where he studied Performance Practice, Baroque Oboe, Shawm, Recorder and early dance with Kenneth Roth, Daniel Pinkham and Julia Sutton. He has studied Baroque oboe with Geoffrey Burgess and Meg Owens. In addition to performance with Collegium Vocale, he has performed with the Bloomington (IN) Bach Cantata Project and Early Music Missouri.

Kyle Dzapo, Professor of Music at Bradley University, has performed recitals in London, Denmark, France, and South Korea, on live broadcasts for Wisconsin Public Radio and Chicago’s WFMT, and at Lincoln Center’s Bruno Walter Auditorium. In the coming months, she looks forward to performances in Singapore; Sydney, Australia; and Zagreb, Croatia. She will also present a lecture-recital at the 2025 National Flute Association Convention in Atlanta in August. Her latest book, Joachim Andersen: Flutist, Conductor, and Composer of More than the Etudes​​​​​, will be released by Oxford University Professor in August as will Au bord de la mer, Op. 9, the sixth edition of music in the “Kyle Dzapo Series” published by Zimmermann-Schott. She is a pre-concert lecturer for the Chicago Symphony, has served as Program Chair and President of the Board for the National Flute Association, and has been recognized with awards for both scholarship and teaching at Bradley University. She earned a Doctor of Music degree from Northwestern University where she was a student and teaching assistant of Walfrid Kujala and also holds degrees from New England Conservatory and the University of Michigan. 

An active and versatile musician, Stephanie Hunt performs on both modern and baroque cello. She is currently a member of the Perseid String Quartet and performs regularly with Early Music Missouri. Stephanie has participated in numerous international festivals, including the Nederlandse Orkest- en Ensemble-Academie, Royaumont Formations Professionnelles (France), the Britten-Pears Young Artist Programme, and spent two summers as a Tanglewood Music Center Fellow. Stephanie holds degrees in cello performance from the University of Miami and Rice University, and earned a master’s in baroque cello from the Utrecht Conservatory in the Netherlands. Her principal teachers include Viola de Hoog, Norman Fischer, Hans Jørgen Jensen, Ross Harbaugh, and Monique Bartels. In addition to her performing work, Stephanie teaches cello in the Suzuki program at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (SIUE). She received the Suzuki Association of the Americas Certificate of Achievement in 2023 and became a credentialed Suzuki Cello Teacher Trainer in 2024. In fall 2025, she will launch a long-term training program at SIUE for cellists pursuing Suzuki teacher registration as part of their undergraduate or graduate studies.

Soloist, chamber musician, and orchestral player Lisette Kielson has been described in the press as “sparkling with life” and “performing with true character and style.” Based in Central Illinois and the Chicago area, Lisette performs regularly at Early Music Festivals across the Midwest and has appeared with, among others, Chicago’s Bach Week Festival, Haymarket Opera Company, Music of the Baroque, Peoria Bach Festival, Madison Bach Musicians, Early Music Missouri, and with many Chicago-area early music ensembles, including Chicago Recorder Trio. Former Director of Bradley University’s Collegium Musicum, Lisette serves as Music Director of the Chicago Recorder Society, and on the faculties of Whitewater Early Music Festival and MBM Summer Chamber Music Workshop and maintains an active Zoom studio for students of all levels from across the country. She has recorded with Centaur Records as well as with her own label. For more about Lisette’s activities, visit www.LisetteKielson.com.

John Orfe has fulfilled commissions from choirs, orchestras, and chamber ensembles including Alarm Will Sound, the American Guild of Organists, Illinois Wesleyan University, Two Rivers Chorale, Present Music, Ludovico, Duo Montagnard, Dez Cordas, the Music Institute of Chicago, the University of Ohio School of Music, the Diocese of Peoria, Illinois, and the Champaign-Urbana Symphony Orchestra.  Ensembles that have performed his music include the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Minnesota Orchestra, Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, Spokane Symphony Orchestra, Mannes American Composers Ensemble, Aspen Contemporary Ensemble, Dinosaur Annex, Firebird Ensemble, Holographic Ensemble, Altgeld Chamber Players, John Alexander Singers, the Bergamot Quartet, and new music ensembles at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, North Carolina School of the Arts, and Bowling Green State University. 

He is a winner of a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, the Heckscher Prize from Ithaca College, a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Otto Eckstein Family Fellowship from the Tanglewood Music Center, the William Schuman and Boudleaux Bryant Prizes from BMI, the Morton Gould Award from ASCAP, and first prizes in competitions held by NACUSA, the Pacific Chorale, Choral Arts Ensemble, Eastern Trombone Workshop, and New Music Delaware. His music has been performed on five continents and at national and regional conventions of such organizations as the American Choral Directors Association, North American Saxophone Alliance, Society of Composers, Inc., College Music Society, International Clarinet Association, International Trombone Association, and Music at the Anthology.  His original works and arrangements appear on the Centaur, Delos, and Nonesuch labels and his setting of Langston Hughes’ Fire! has received three recordings and performances by dozens of choirs.

As pianist, Orfe has earned critical acclaim for his interpretations of five centuries of keyboard repertoire ranging from the canonic to the arcane. The core pianist and a founding member of the GRAMMY-Winning new music ensemble Alarm Will Sound, Orfe is also pianist for Present Music in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he premiered and recorded the organ part of Raven Chacon’s Voiceless Mass, which won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Music.  Orfe has performed in Carnegie Hall, Miller Theatre, Roulette, the World Financial Center, and Symphony Space in New York; Disney Hall, Mondavi Hall, and Hertz Hall in California; the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.; and venues in Beijing, Nanning, Seoul, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Krakow, Amsterdam, Berlin, Bremen, Bolzano, Cork, Hamburg, London, Lima, San Jose, Quito, and Saõ Paolo. His solo piano transcription of John Adams’ Short Ride in a Fast Machine was hailed as “a knockout” by the Boston Globe and “breathtaking” by the San Francisco Chronicle, which also praised his “hypervirtuosic” performances of Conlon Nancarrow. He has recorded in over thirty albums on the Cantaloupe, Nonesuch, Kairos, Parma, and Albany Records labels.  He serves as Organist at First United Methodist Church in downtown Peoria, Illinois, where he was appointed the Peoria Symphony Orchestra’s first Composer-in-Residence.  His collaboration with Dr. Justin Vickers, Distinguished Professor of Music at Illinois State University, the 75-minute album The Poet’s Echo, which included the first English-language translation of Benjamin Britten’s song cycle of the same name, received a five-star rating in Fanfare Magazine. Recently Orfe began an appointment as Music Director of the McDonough Choral Society in Macomb, Illinois.

He has been a regular performer on the Peoria Bach Festival with many creative programs.

Adriana La Rosa Ransom is currently Director of the School of Music at Illinois State University, where she was cello professor for 15 years. She received a Bachelor of Music degree in cello performance from the University of Missouri, where she studied with Nina Gordon. She earned Master and Doctorate degrees in performance from the University of Minnesota, studying cello with Tanya Remenikova and chamber music with Jorja Fleezanis. As a soloist, Adriana has recently appeared with the Peoria Symphony Orchestra, the Illinois State Wind Symphony, and the Illinois State Symphony Orchestra. She has also appeared as a guest artist on notable solo and chamber music recital series, including the Peoria Bach Festival, Chicago Cello Society concerts, the Trinity Lutheran Candlelight Concert Series, and at universities throughout the Midwest. Currently Principal Cellist of the Peoria Symphony Orchestra, she formerly was a member of the Minnesota Opera Orchestra, the St. Cloud Symphony (MN), the European Musical Festival Orchestra (Germany), and Sinfonia da Camera (IL). Adriana has served on the faculty at Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Cloud State University, the MacPhail Center for Music in Minneapolis, and the Grumo (Italy) Music Festival. She is the recipient of the University Outstanding Teacher Award, University Outstanding Service Award, and the Illinois American String Teachers Association Distinguished Service Award, among others. She is an invited presenter at the American String Teacher National Conference, covering topics such as David Popper’s character pieces, supplementary etudes for intermediate level cello concertos, and the use of visual color as a means towards musical expression.

Madelyn Rowland’s horn playing, described as having “depth with incredible nuance in regards to the composer’s intention,” is influenced as much by her diverse educational and performance background as it is her passion for teaching horn. One of the youngest in an artistic family, Madelyn’s love of music is rooted in a childhood surrounded by musicians, including the influence of her Bluegrass singer-songwriter and guitar player grandfather, Hardy Brendle.  Passionate about diversifying her music education, Madelyn pursued a variety of secondary disciplines throughout her undergraduate and graduate studies. In studying voice and piano, she became the first student at Western Kentucky University to hold positions in the top vocal and instrumental ensembles concurrently. As a graduate student at The University of Alabama, Madelyn studied composition with Drs. Amir Zaheri and Tyler Walker while maintaining full-time assistantships in both the horn studio and the department of musicology. Madelyn was also a member of Grammy-nominated 2015 All-American College Band of Anaheim, California.Ma delyn has maintained an active performing and teaching career with international reach, including Costa Rica and China, where she performed, taught lessons, and led masterclasses. As a private lessons instructor with over thirteen years of experience, Madelyn’s students have gone on to a myriad of careers in music, including: education, music therapy, non-profit administration, and orchestra management. As a performer, Madelyn maintains an active schedule with local and regional orchestras, most notably the Chattanooga and Huntsville Symphonies. In addition, she has recorded with Capitol Records, Bates Brothers, and Ocean Way Studios. Madelyn earned her Bachelor’s Degree in Music Education from Western Kentucky University, and both a Master’s in Music Performance, and Doctor of Musical Arts from The University of Alabama, in which she graduated summa cum laude. Her primary teachers were Natalie Adcock, and internationally renowned pedagogue Charles “Skip” Snead. Madelyn has completed secondary studies with Jeff Scott, co-founding member of the Imani Winds, and John McGuire, distinguished horn pedagogue and player. In addition, Madelyn has worked with noted horn players David Jolley, Andrew Bain, Nancy Joy, Laura Brenes, Kristy Morell, Gordon James, and Radu Rusu. Madelyn currently lives in St. Louis with her husband, Drake, and cat, Lux. In her free time, Madelyn is an avid reader, and auto-chess player.