Judith Malafronte
Antonio Draghi’s Oratorio di Giuditta
Judith Malafronte, mezzo-soprano, has an active career as a soloist in opera, oratorio, and recital. She has appeared with the San Francisco Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl, the St. Louis Symphony, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Handel and Haydn Society, and Mark Morris Dance Group. She has sung at the Tanglewood Festival, the Boston Early Music Festival, the Utrecht Early Music Festival, and the Göttingen Handel Festival.
Winner of several top awards in Italy, Spain, Belgium, and the United States, including the Grand Prize at the International Vocal Competition in Hertogenbosch, Holland, Ms. Malafronte holds degrees with honors from Vassar College and Stanford University, and studied at the Eastman School of Music, in Paris and Fontainebleau with Mlle. Nadia Boulanger, and with Giulietta Simionato in Milan as a Fulbright scholar. She has recorded for major labels in a broad range of repertoire, from medieval chant to contemporary music, and her writings have appeared in Opera News, Stagebill, Islands, Early Music America Magazine, Schwann Inside, and Opus.
Dr. Jane Tylus
Freschi’s Giuditta
Jane Tylus is a Professor of Italian Studies and Comparative Literature at New York University, where she is also the Faculty Director of the Humanities Initiative. Her recent books include Reclaiming Catherine of Siena: Literature, Literacy, and the Signs of Others (2009), The Poetics of Masculinity in Early Modern Italy and Spain, co-edited with Gerry Milligan (2010), and a translation of the complete poetry of Gaspara Stampa (2010). Her monograph Siena, City of Secrets and the co-edited Cultures of Early Modern Translation (with Karen Newman) will appear in 2015. She is the General Editor for I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance.
Dr. Eric Bianchi
Bassani’s Giona
Dr. Bianchi is Assistant Professor of Music at Fordham University in New York City. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 2011. His research explores the intellectual and scientific contexts of music during the Early Modern period, with particular focus on the musical writings of the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher. He was a Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome in 2008-2009.
Dr. Wendy Chung
Charpentier’s Mors Saülis et Jonathae
Dr. Chung is a board certified clinical geneticist with a PhD in molecular genetics. She received her MD from Cornell University and her PhD from The Rockefeller University. She is director of the clinical genetics program at Columbia University, a co-director of the molecular genetics diagnostics lab, and heads a research laboratory in the division of molecular genetics investigating the genetic bases for a variety of Mendelian and complex traits.