Piffaro, The Renaissance Band

Video Edu-site: Renaissance music, history and instruments

Regional School Programs

National Seminars

Piffaro’s acclaimed edu-site includes engaging Piffaro interviews, videos and audio clips about Renaissance instruments, music and life. Find out more  about this and Piffaro’s regional programs and national seminars, too.  Click for more.

Piffaro is likely the most recorded Renaissance wind band ever and has just come out with “Waytes”, a CD that is enhanced- in other words, the CD itself contains pictures and writings (even funny ones!) about the pieces and the recording process. Check out our YouTube video of us recording last year’s extraordinary CD, “Vespers,” too.    Click here to see the YouTube video. Click here to listen to WRTI’s radio interview about “Vespers.” Click here to buy either CD.

From the Philadelphia Inquirer
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/columnists/david_patrick_stearns/20090331_What_do_women_want__Go_ask_Chaucer.html
Posted Tue. Mar. 31, 2009

What do women want? Go ask Chaucer

By David Patrick Stearns
Inquirer Classical Music Critic

Wendy Steiner

NEW YORK – Centuries collided last weekend in a smallish room in Chelsea Studios, where some of the biggest names in the early-music movement – from Anonymous 4 to Piffaro to soprano Julianne Baird – were collaborating in ways they’d never attempted.

The occasion was a rehearsal for the new Chaucer-inspired opera The Loathly Lady, premiering tomorrow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Irvine Auditorium. It requires musical specialists from a number of distant eras but sees them through a distinctly 21st-century lens.

“Can we make shawms and rebecs play a tango? I think we just did – and with such joy,” said conductor Gary Thor Wedow during a break. “It was like they’re playing hooky.”

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Piffaro’s second competition for young recorder players, ages 12 to18, was held on Saturday, January 10, 2009, at the Settlement Music School in Philadelphia.

The Performers

Five finalists, chosen on the basis of tapes that they submitted in November, performed before a small, but enthusiastic and supportive audience.  A smattering of snow and ice kept some people away who otherwise would have attended, although the finalists had no trouble reaching Philadelphia from distant snow capitals of the country – Denver, Minneapolis and Chicago! Read more »