Our current season's soloists
Soprano Hannah De Priest is fast emerging as a “breakout artist” (the Boston Globe) renowned for her fearless and “masterful” (Olyrix) performances. De Priest enjoys a fast-rising global career of concert and operatic engagements. In the 2026-2027 season, she makes return appearances with Haymarket Opera (Ninfa/Proserpina, L’Orfeo), Music of the Baroque (Haydn’s Lord Nelson Mass and Charpentier’s Te Deum), Bach in the City (Bach’s Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen and Christmas Oratorio), the Bach Society of St. Louis, Atlanta Baroque Orchestra, and The Newberry Consort. She will record and perform the title role in La Stellidaura Vendicante with the Boston Early Music Festival in Bremen, Germany for the CPO label and make debuts with the Grand Rapids Symphony (Handel’s Messiah) and Saint Joseph Symphony (Holiday Cheer). Hannah currently makes her home in Philadelphia, where she lives with her husband and rescue dog, Teddy. Her “radiant” (Early Music America) debut solo album Arcadian Dreams was released in spring 2026.
David Breitman is equally at home with the fortepiano and the modern piano, and enjoys both solo and ensemble playing. His collaboration with the late Sanford Sylvan spanned more than thirty years, with several hundred recitals and four CD’s, ranging from Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin, to the premiere recording of The Glass Hammer, a major song cycle by the Cuban-American composer Jorge Martin. He has recorded the Mozart piano-violin sonatas on historical instruments with Jean-François Rivest, Beethoven’s violin sonatas with Elizabeth Wallfisch and cello sonatas and variations with Jaap ter Linden. In a collaboration of a different sort, he was one of seven fortepianists on the ground-breaking recording of the complete Beethoven piano sonata cycle on period instruments for CLAVES from 1997.
David joined the Historical Performance Program at Oberlin Conservatory in 1991, teaching fortepiano and clavichord as well as courses in performance practice. With his book, Piano-Playing Revisited: What Modern Players Can Learn from Period Instruments which appeared to critical acclaim in 2021, he summarizes a lifetime of experience as a performer and teacher.
Lucas Harris leads a busy freelancer’s life as a lutenist, conductor, continuo player, teacher, lecturer, coach, and researcher. His collection of over twenty plucked-string instruments includes various Renaissance & Baroque lutes/guitars as well as a theorbo, cittern, bandora, an 1831 Guadagnini guitar, an 18th-century English guittar, and a PRS electric guitar with a Floyd-Rose tremolo bar.
Lucas discovered the lute during his undergraduate studies at Pomona College, where he graduated summa cum laude. He then studied early music at the Civica scuola di musica di Milano and at the Hochschule für Künste Bremen before beginning his freelancing career in New York City. For the past two decades he bases his activities in Toronto, where he serves as the regular lutenist for Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra. He is a founding member of the Toronto Continuo Collective, the Vesuvius Ensemble (dedicated to Southern Italian folk music), as well as the Lute Legends Collective (an association of specialists in ancient plucked-string traditions from different cultures). Lucas plays with many ensembles in Canada and the USA and has worked in recent years with the Helicon Foundation, the Smithsonian Chamber Players, The Newberry Consort, Les Délices, and Jordi Savall / Le Concert des Nations. He is also a regular guest artist for Early Music Vancouver, and will be assistant director for EMV’s production of Monteverdi’s Orfeo in 2026 in addition to developing an EMV concert featuring Dowland’s Lachrimae alongside songs about the therapeutic power of music. Lucas teaches graduate students at the University of Toronto and Case Western Reserve University, and is also on faculty at several workshops including the Tafelmusik Baroque Summer Institutes, Oberlin Conservatory’s Baroque Performance Institute, and the Canadian Renaissance Music Summer School. Also a choral conductor, Lucas has been the Artistic Director of the Toronto Chamber Choir since 2014 and has developed and conducted over forty themed concert programs for the TCC. He has also been a guest director for the Pacific Baroque Orchestra, the Ohio State University Opera Program, Les voix baroques, Atalante, and the Toronto Consort. Lucas’s longstanding interest in women composers has resulted in many projects including the reconstruction of 12 solo-voice motets by Chiara Margarita Cozzolani.
Soloists we have worked with in the past.
Brandon Acker is a widely known musician, educator, and content creator recognized for his artistry, versatility, and passion for historical and classical music. He specializes in classical guitar and early plucked instruments such as theorbo, archlute, and Baroque guitar. With over 680,000 YouTube subscribers and 75 million views, he is one of the most-watched classical guitar and lute players on the internet.
As an educator, Brandon founded Arpeggiato, an online music school specializing in “all things that go pluck!” He has also produced several online classical guitar courses with more than 3,600 students enrolled. His performance career spans from early roots in rock guitar to international tours on historical instruments, performing repertoire from the Baroque period.
He has performed with ensembles such as Apollo’s Fire, the Handel and Haydn Society, the Breathtaking Collective with Bruce Dickey, the Joffrey Ballet, the Newberry Consort, and Haymarket Opera Company. Brandon was a laureate in the 2020 Indiana Early Music concerto competition and won first place in the Society of American Musicians competition in 2010.
His recordings include A Wanderer’s Guitar(Schubert lieder arranged for voice and guitar), Corelli Op. 5 Violin Sonatas with Rachel Barton Pine, and Strung Up, featuring minimalist works for harp and guitar. His lute playing also appears on popular video game soundtracks, including Civilization VI, Civilization VII, and Total War: Warhammer III.