Baroque Feast

The music of the Baroque era holds many treasures that enchant each new generation. Today's musicians are still discovering masterpieces from the 17th and 18th centuries that sound fresh and new to contemporary audiences, as do the evergreen works of Vivaldi, Handel, Bach and Corelli featured in the Iceland Symphony Orchestra's Baroque Feast.

The soprano soloist, María Konráðsdóttir, has garnered much praise for her bright, tender and exquisitely expressive voice, alongside her beautifully nuanced interpretations. María sings a colourful selection of arias from operas by Handel. The concert will also feature works by Rameau, as well as the medieval work "O Frondens Virga" by Hildegard von Bingen. Von Bingen founded her own Benedictine convent around 1150, where she composed numerous works that have captivated scholars as well as music lovers in later centuries.

María has received international acclaim for her singing, and performed in numerous recitals and festivals both domestically and internationally. María specializes in early music and has been the soloist with Baroque ensembles such as Lautten Compagney in Berlin and Barokkbandið Brák. In 2018, María completed her master's degree in Lieder and Oratorio singing at the University of the Arts in Berlin.

Leading the orchestra is British violinist and conductor Peter Hanson, who has for decades been a leading figure in the world of historically informed performance of Baroque music — an approach aimed at capturing the spirit of the music as it sounded in its time. Serving as concertmaster in John Eliot Gardiner's, renowned Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique for over 25 years, Hanson regularly performs with acclaimed orchestras around the world, either as a soloist, concertmaster or conductor — sometimes all three at once.