Daniel Abraham, director/conductor, is Professor of Music, Director of Choral Activities, and Chair of the Department of Performing Arts at American University. He has garnered praise for his performances from many noteworthy sources, including Gramophone, the Washington Post, Choral Journal, BBC Magazine, Fanfare, Diapason, BBC Radio 3, American Record Review, and Early Music America. In addition to his broad work in the choral field, where he is a champion of new music, Abraham is a specialist in the performance and practice of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music. He served as Conductor and Artistic Director of The Bach Sinfonia for twenty-one seasons. As a conductor and scholar, Abraham has often sought out works previously unknown to present-day audiences and has been responsible for numerous world, North American, and regional early-music premieres with many performances using materials he has edited from primary manuscript sources. Abraham has conducted performances before two National Meetings of the American Musicological Society, has been broadcast nationally on NPR’s Performance Today, Great Sacred Music, and Sunday Baroque, and has appeared at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Music Center at Strathmore, the National Women’s Museum of the Arts, the National Portrait Gallery, the Cosmos Club, and many other venues in the eastern United States. Guest conducting appearances include concerts with the Trinity Wall Street Baroque Orchestra and Trinity Chorus (New York), as conductor of the Massachusetts Northwestern All-State Chorus and internationally with various university and professional ensembles in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Canada, Croatia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Spain, and Egypt where he was Visiting Distinguished Professor of the Arts. He has prepared choruses for national television broadcast including the Kennedy Center Honors Gala and Christmas in Washington and appeared on the nationally syndicated PBS series History Detectives. In addition to six commercial audio recordings on the Dorian, Sonoluminus and Musica Omnia labels, his recent scholarly work includes: the National Endowment for the Humanities-funded multidisciplinary immersive audio project “Hearing Bach’s Acoustic” with technologist Braxton Boren, interactive-media designer Yana Sakellion, and audio engineer Rogerio Naressi; a critical edition of choral music by Heinrich Biber for Carus Verlag; and co-editing with Alicia Kopfstein-Penk and Andrew Weaver the volume Leonard Bernstein and Washington, DC for Eastman Studies in Music (University of Rochester Press).

Matthew Van Hoose, pianist & Chamber Singers accompanist, has been hailed by the Baltimore Sun for his “spirited and polished playing.” Van Hoose has established himself as one of the most sought-after pianists in the Baltimore-Washington area, demonstrating his extraordinary abilities as soloist and collaborative artist. He has performed in numerous solo and chamber recitals in the United States and Canada. Van Hoose has performed with members of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra as part of the Candlelight Concert Series and with the Post-Classical Ensemble. He has appeared as concerto soloist with the Virginia Symphony, the NIH Philharmonia, the Virginia Beach Pops Orchestra, the Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra of Greater Washington, the Oberlin Conservatory Symphony Orchestra and the Indiana University Symphony Orchestra. Along with his collaborations with world-renowned artists, including flutist Jonathan Snowden and clarinetist Loren Kitt, Van Hoose has performed at many venues in the Baltimore-Washington area including the Kennedy Center, the Mansion at Strathmore and the Lyceum. Van Hoose has won prizes at several competitions, including an Honorable Mention in the 2002 Bartok-Kabalevsky-Prokofiev International Piano Competition. He earned a Doctor of Music degree in Piano Performance from Indiana University, where he also earned a Master of Music degree. He holds a Bachelor of Music degree in Piano Performance and a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Oberlin College and Conservatory of Music. He has studied and performed at prestigious music festivals including Chautauqua, Sarasota and Kent-Blossom. His principal teachers have been Walter Noona, Lydia Frumkin, Reiko Neriki and the legendary Gyorgy Sebok. A native of Norfolk, Virginia, Van Hoose attended Norfolk Academy and graduated summa cum laude in 1989. As a faculty member of American University’s Department of Performing Arts, he teaches piano, serves as collaborative pianist for singers and instrumentalists, and plays for the AU Chamber Singers. Millions of Washingtonians hear him every baseball season, as Van Hoose is the ballpark organist for the Washington Nationals.