"A brilliant performance ... eloquently played ... close to the essence of chamber music." Joseph McLellan, The Washington Post, June 26, 2000

"A virtuoso at conveying myriad colors" ... "The audience clearly was entranced ... flutist Jeffrey Cohan captivated young and old.” Cecelia Porter, The Washington Post, July 14, 2001

"Baroque flutist Jeffrey Cohan and harpsichordist George Shangrow give new meaning to the intimacy implicit in the genre of chamber music... They have forged not only an exquisitely subtle collaboration but also a common scholarly interpretation of how Bach would have had the music performed.

"They responded intuitively to each other's rhythmic elasticity and echoed each other's elaborate ornamentations with what sounded like spontaneous inspiration... Almost as impressive was the silent attentiveness that their musicmaking commanded.

"Bach may have been composing for a soft instrument with a very limited dynamic range, but the music he produced was exuberant, joyous and lyrical. It was these qualities that Cohan and Shangrow communicated..." Joan Reinthaler, The Washington Post, July 16, 2002

Praise for CHCMF

For Frederick the Great, a Concert of the Same Quality WASHINGTON POST Monday, July 2012
The second of two concerts in this year’s Capitol Hill Chamber Music Festival, held at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church Sunday night, was devoted to music from the Prussian court of Frederick the Great. The theme is a timely one since Germany celebrates this year the 300th birthday of the Prussian king who, besides being a brilliant military strategist, was also a passionate musician. Fittingly, the festival’s artistic director, Jeffrey Cohan, played a baroque flute that is a replica of an instrument made for Frederick by his teacher, Johann Joachim Quantz, now in the collections of the Library of Congress.
Cohan is a wonderful player who exploits all the richly expressive potential of the baroque wooden flute with ease and subtlety. With his partners, harpsichordist Joseph Gascho and cellist Gozde Yasar, Cohan played sonatas by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Georg Benda and Quantz — all musicians employed by Frederick’s at his Potsdam palace, Sanssouci — as well as a sonata by the monarch himself.
Late in his life, Johann Sebastian Bach visited Emanuel, the most famous of his several composer sons, in Potsdam. “Old Bach” was given a warm welcome at court, and Frederick asked Bach if he could improvise on a theme he had composed. Bach complied, evidently to the king’s satisfaction. But later, Bach used Frederick’s theme as the basis for one of his late masterpieces, “The Musical Offering.” Selections from this sublime work, along with a Bach violin sonata adapted for flute, were the culmination of a thoughtfully conceived and most enjoyable evening. -- Patrick Rucker


At St. Mark's,Good Things Come in Trios
WASHINGTON POST Thursday, July 2, 2009
It's probably fanciful imagining a large audience turning up to hear obscure chamber music at the height of summer vacation season. But the mere 29 heads I counted at St. Mark's Episcopal Church for Tuesday's Capitol Hill Chamber Music Festival recital seemed an especially pathetic showing for such a stylishly played evening. St. Mark's, one of Washington's more strikingly beautiful and acoustically friendly churches, added just the right bloom to the gentle buzz of the festival's period instruments. Tuesday's program -- commemorating the 200th anniversary of the deaths of Haydn and his little-known contemporary, Carl Wilhelm Glösch, and the 250th birthday of François Devienne -- was predictable for a festival whose artistic director, Jeffrey Cohan, is a specialist in baroque and classical flute: All five pieces played were 18th-century trios for flute, violin and cello. If such flute, flute and more flute programming produced an inevitable sameness of tone, these lesser trios by the great Haydn, and great trios by the lesser Glösch, Devienne and their contemporary Franz Anton Hoffmeister met in a middle ground of high competence (the dark-hued Devienne D Minor Trio marginally more memorable than the other scores), and all were played with lived-in ease and affection. -- Joe Banno

Artistic Director and flutist JEFFREY COHAN has performed as soloist in 25 countries, most recently Ukraine, Slovenia and Germany, on all transverse flutes from the Renaissance through the present, and has won the Erwin Bodky Award (Boston) and the top prize in the Flanders Festival International Concours Musica Antiqua (Brugge, Belgium), two of the most important prizes for period instrument performance in America and Europe. He has premiered many concerti and other works by Slovenian and American composers. He also directs the Black Hawk Chamber Music Festival in Illinois and Iowa and the Salish Sea Early Music Festival. He can “play many superstar flutists one might name under the table” according to the New York Times, and is “The Flute Master” according to the Boston Globe.

Conductor and harpsichordist JOSEPH GASCHO has won numerous grants and prizes, including first prize in the 2002 Jurow International Harpsichord Competition, and the Pomeroy Prize from the University of Maryland. Recent performing highlights include a world premiere recording of a newly discovered aria by J.S. Bach for National Public Radio, a production of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas in Aix-en-Provence, France, conducting Vivaldi’s Gloria at the Magnolia Baroque Festival, and performing his own transcriptions of works by Bach and Charpentier. He recently conducted Vivaldi’s Eurilla e Alcindo at the University of Maryland, and Handel’s Tamerlano with Opera Vivente. He also coaches chamber music and coordinates accompanying and performs at the Amherst Early Music Festival, and has performed at Oberlin’s Baroque Performance Institute and the International Baroque Institute at Longy. He is pursuing a D.M.A. at the University of Maryland, where he also teaches basso continuo and performance practice. He also teaches at George Washington University.

Risa Browder received her professional training at Oberlin Conservatory. After graduating from Oberlin and completing graduate studies at the Royal College of Music in London and the Schola Cantorum in Basel, Ms. Browder began her professional career in Europe with Academy of Ancient Music, English Concert, Les Musiciens du Louvre, Purcell Quartet, and London Baroque, among others. Ms. Browder’s interest in historical performance on violin, viola, and viola d’amore ranging from the 17th century to the Romantic era, has led her to perform as a soloist with the Folger Consort, Washington Bach Consort (concertmaster), Capriole, Boston Bach, Smithsonian Chamber Players, and Rebel. Ms. Browder is co-director of Modern Musick, a period-instrument chamber orchestra which debuted in 2001 to high acclaim in Washington, DC. Recording credits include Dorian, Chandos, Deutsche Grammophon, Virgin Classics, and EMI. She also enjoys teaching and is on the faculty of the Peabody Conservatory where she teaches baroque violin and viola and together with her husband, John Moran, directs the Baltimore Baroque Band.

A native Washingtonian, Leslie Nero spent many years in Ontario and Quebec performing in modern orchestras before returning to the D.C. area, where she is currently an active freelance musician on both modern and baroque violin and viola. In recent years she has performed locally with Opera Lafayette, Modern Musick, Folger Consort, the Handel Choir of Baltimore, The Bach Sinfonia and the Washington Bach Consort, and has participated in summer early-music festivals in Oberlin, Vancouver, Seattle, Boston, Toronto, and Albuquerque. In addition to her performing career, Ms. Nero teaches beginning strings for the Alexandria City Public Schools.

John Moran is a musician and musicologist who specializes in historically informed performance of music from the 17th through the 20th centuries on the cello and viola da gamba. He studied both at the Oberlin Conservatory, baroque cello at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in Basel, Switzerland, and musicology at King's College London. He has performed and recorded with numerous groups in Europe, including Les Musiciens du Louvre, The Consort of Musicke, English Baroque Soloists. Since 1994 he has lived in the Washington, DC area. He is a regular member of REBEL, a New York based baroque ensemble and the music director of Modern Musick, a Washington period-instrument ensemble. He has also appeared with Opera Lafayette, the Washington Bach Consort, the Folger Consort, the Smithsonian Chamber Orchestra and Chamber Players. He teaches viola da gamba and baroque cello at the Peabody Conservatory, where he is also co-director of the Baltimore Baroque Band. He is a contributor to the revised New Grove Dictionary of Music (2001), reviews books on musical topics for various journals, and is writing a historical monograph on the cello for Yale University Press. He is married to the violinist Risa Browder.