Founded by director Gwendolyn Toth in 1986, ARTEK features some of America's finest singers and instrumentalists in performances of seventeenth century repertoire from Italy and Germany. Highlights of ARTEK’s past seasons include acclaimed performances in 2002 and 2003 of their theater show, I’ll Never See the Stars Again, at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2005; standing ovation performances to sell-out crowds at the Regensburg (Germany) Tage Alter Musik Festival in 1998 and 2003; and a debut performance in 2003 at the prestigious Boston Early Music Festival. ARTEK’s recordings of Monteverdi’s Orfeo and other early Italian repertoire have been widely praised.
ARTEK toured internationally from 1997 to 2002 with the Mark Morris Dance Group, visiting major venues in the United Kingdom, Italy, and Canada as well as more than 50 of America’s premier theaters: BAM, Cal Performances in Berkeley, the Shubert Theater in Boston, McCarter Theater in Princeton, and many more from California to the Northeast. ARTEK has appeared in Europe at the Regensburg Tage Alter Musik festival; at the Utrecht Fringe Festival; and in Feldkirchen, Austria; Dolni Lukavice, Czech Republic; Beaulieu, France; Konstanz, Germany; and Kreuzlingen, Switzerland.
In the New York City area ARTEK has appeared on Wall-toWall Opera at Symphony Space; as featured performers with the Bach-Schutz Society Conference; on the Kaye Playhouse Chamber Music Series; on Music Before 1800; and on the Princeton Friends of Music series. ARTEK produces its own New York City and Princeton NJ season of evening concerts, and also performs regularly throughout the concert season on the free lunchtime concert series, Midtown Concerts, in midtown Manhattan.
In spring 2001, director Gwendolyn Toth was awarded the Newell Jenkins Prize for excellence in early music performance in recognition of her work. ARTEK made its Lincoln Center debut in spring 2010 on the "What Makes it Great" series with Robert Kapilow, and traveled in June to the Berkeley Early Music Festival and Indianapolis Early Music Festival for highly praised performances of Italian madrigals. ARTEK’s latest CD is the complete Madrigals of Monteverdi, Book 5, and will release a recording of Rosenmüller’s solo cantatas in late 2012. For more information, please visit artekearlymusic.org.
