David Shuler – Musical Director, was educated at the Eastman School of Music, Columbia University, and the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood.  He studied organ with David Craighead and Leonard Raver, and composition with Joseph Schwantner, Samuel Adler and Gunther Schuller.  He has received numerous awards, including a BMI-SC award for composition and First Prize in the Mid-Hudson Valley Chapter American Guild of Organists Organ Playing Competition. 

Mr. Shuler has been Director of Music and Organist at the Church of Saint Luke in the Fields in New York City since 1988.  Prior to the appointment at St. Luke’s, Mr. Shuler was the Director of Music at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Stamford, Connecticut.  He has also held positions as Organist and Choirmaster at the Church of the Holy Trinity in New York City and Assistant Organist at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.  Mr. Shuler has also been active as a synagogue musician, presently holding the position of Organist and Choir Director for Congregation Habonim of New York City.  In addition, Mr. Shuler is the Music Director of the Dalton Alumni Chorale in Manhattan. 

In addition to a wide array of historically informed concerts of early music, Mr. Shuler has been particularly active as a champion of contemporary music.  He has premiered organ works of Charles Wuorinen, William Albright, Ralph Shapey, Gunther Schuller, and Frank Retzel, among others.  Mr. Shuler received a National Endowment for the Arts Consortium Commissioning Grant to commission works from Ralph Shapey, Charles Wuorinen, and Gunther Schuller as well as a grant from the Washington, D.C. American Guild of Organists Foundation for the promotion of contemporary music.  In addition, he has recorded the choral music of Frank Wigglesworth with the Choir of the Church of St. Luke in the Fields for CRI.  In 1998, Mr. Shuler received a grant from the Mary Flagler Cary Trust to record Responsoria by Richard Toensing with the Choir at St. Luke’s for the North/South Consonance label.

Mr. Shuler has been featured as an organ soloist on both the East and West coasts in productions of the ballet Voluntaries, Glen Tetley’s choreography of Francis Poulenc’s Concerto for Organ, Strings and Timpani by the American Ballet Theatre and the Dance Theatre of Harlem.

Mr. Shuler is a Fellow of the American Guild of Organists, and was awarded the certificate at the age of 22, one of the youngest organists to achieve this distinction.  He has served on numerous AGO committees, both at the national and local levels, and was for seven years the Director of the National Examination Committee of the A.G.O. He has also served as Director-at-Large of the Association of Anglican Musicians. 

Phillip Cheah – bass-baritone, is a member of the New York Choral Artists, the Concert Chorale of New York, and the renowned Bach Choir at Holy Trinity Lutheran Church.  He has sung under the batons of Lorin Maazel, Riccardo Muti, Kurt Masur, Martin Hasselböck, Bernard Labadie, and Esa-Pekka Salonen, having performed with the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, American Symphony Orchestra, Singapore Symphony Orchestra, Orchestra of St. Luke's, Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra, Columbus Indiana Philharmonic, Vox Vocal Ensemble, Western Wind Vocal Ensemble, and Ensemble In Flore of Vassar College. 

A tireless champion of contemporary music, Mr. Cheah has performed works by Joe Manieri, John Eaton, David Lang, James MacMillan, and Egil Hovland.  He performed Ralph Shapey’s Praise in 2002 as part of the University of Chicago’s celebration of the late composer’s 80^th birthday as well as the U.S. premières of John Tavener’s monumental all-night vigil The Veil of the Temple at Lincoln Centre in 2004 and Paul McCartney's Ecce Cor Meum with in 2006.  He is a co-founding member of the C4 Choral Composer-Conductor Collective, an ensemble dedicated solely to the performance and promotion of the music written in the last quarter of a century.  Other premières include song cycles written especially for him by Patrick Castillo and Jonathan David.  He is also actively involved with the ComplineNYC project, a musical effort to bring to New York City a public offering of meditation through Gregorian chant.  He has recorded on the Pro Organo and Tzadik labels. 

Mr. Cheah is in strong demand as a conductor, having worked with the Pocket Opera Players of Chicago, the Handel Society of Dartmouth, Cerddorion Vocal Ensemble, the Indiana University Opera Theatre, and the Amato Opera, where he was also a répétiteur.  In 2005, he music directed to wonderful acclaim Zeke Hecker’s The Forest, the first work commissioned by the Amato Opera in its 57-year history.  As an accompanist, he has given recitals with the Aguavá New Music Studio, the Millennium Wagner Opera Company, and the Opera Collective of New York. Equally at home with musical theatre, he was the vocal coach for Ragtime at The Putney School and served as music director for Bloomington Music Works’ productions of The Fantasticks and Little Shop of Horrors, as well as Working at the Dwight-Englewood School in New Jersey. 

Mr. Cheah is a guest lecturer at the Manhattan School of Music and Barnard College; previous teaching appointments include the Putney School in Vermont, and Cathedral High School in New York City where he was the Director of Music.  He has worked for the Music Department at Oxford University Press and has also been the personal assistant to the composer/satirist Peter Schickele.  He holds both B.M. and M.M. degrees from Indiana University where he studied piano, conducting, and opera coaching with Jan Harrington, Thomas Dunn, John Poole, and Christopher Harding.

Katharine (Kit) Emory, mezzo-soprano, is accomplished in a wide range of musical genres, from jazz to opera.  She has been a featured soloist with the Handel & Haydn Society, New York Virtuoso Singers, St. Bart’s Summer Festival of Sacred Music, and many other fine ensembles in both New York and Boston. World premieres have included John Harbison’s Pulitzer Prize winning oratorio, Flight into Egypt, Thea Musgrave’s chamber opera Voices of Power and Protest, Tavener’s Requiem, and The Little Match Girl Passion by David Lang.  Kit can also be heard in concerts with other NY ensembles such as Musica Sacra and Sacred Music in a Sacred Space at St. Ignatius Loyola. 

Leading operatic roles include Cinderella in La Cenerentola, the Mother in Amahl and the Night Visitors, Hansel in Hänsel and Gretel, and Bessie in Mahagonny Songspiel.  Kit has toured the U.S. with the New York City Opera, Houston Grand Opera, and Opera New England.  She was privileged to perform this past summer in a rare and highly acclaimed production of Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots with Bard Summerscape. 

Internationally, Kit has sung at the Proms Festival in London with Sir Roger Norrington and also in the Edinburgh Festival, as part of Mark Morris’s production of Orféo.  With the Handel & Haydn Society, she has recorded several CDs, including Unto Us A Child Is Born: Tudor Christmas Music by Tallis & Byrd (Arabesque) on which she is a soloist.  In 2003, she was among a handful of singers chosen by critically-acclaimed director Chen Shi-Zheng to perform in his ground-breaking staged production of the Monteverdi Vespers.  She has shared the stage with Dawn Upshaw in Osvaldo Golijov’s Ainadamar at Carnegie Hall and performed Bach cantatas with the Orpheus Ensemble at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

Melissa Fogarty - Soprano, hailed by The New York Times for her “delirious abandon” onstage, has been enjoying a banner year in both opera and concert. In March, she made an auspicious debut at New York City Opera, in the leading role of Soprano I Cupid/Venus/Honor) in Purcell’s King Arthur. April brought a return engagement with the Seattle Baroque Orchestra, where Ms. Fogarty starred as Serpina in Pergolesi’s La serva padrona and was cited by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer for her “bright attractive soprano and ample technique.” 

In May, Ms. Fogarty impressed public and critics alike in VOX, City Opera’s annual showcase of new American operas, performing Dice Thrown, a virtuosic one-woman "aleatoric soundscape" by John King. Following that were two world premieres: the demanding new song cycle A Field Manual, written especially for her, baritone Chris Pedro Trakas, and the Fireworks Ensemble by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Del Tredici. In June, she gave another world premiere: Christopher James’s Five Sappho Fragments, for soprano and chamber orchestra, with the esteemed ensemble  North/South Consonance, conducted by Max Lifchitz. 

Todd Frizzell – Tenor, has been an active and impressionable singer in churches, synagogues, concert halls, opera houses, cruise ships, practice rooms,  and basement apartments throughout the world.  He is heard on at least six CD's produced by and sold at Metropolitan Museum of Art shops nationwide and in finer airports, all of them with Early Music New York  under the direction of Frederick Renz, and specializing in the music of  the Christian spirit of the last 1000 years. With the group he performed on American and French television for prime time audiences, as well as featured appearances at the Spoleto Festival, Italy, and on the Broadway stage. 2009 includes "La Nueva Espana" and "A Renaissance Christmas" at the Cathedral of St John the Divine. He sang solos in Handel's Israel in Egypt with the National Chorale at Avery Fisher Hall and Gershwin with the American Symphony Orchestra at Alice Tully Hall. 

He has been a member of the Western Wind Vocal Ensemble for 10 years. The group has been featured on WQXR frequently, and has performed and recorded an extensive range of a cappella repertoire internationally, and is well known for their workshops and residencies at Smith College  in Northampton, Mass. and in Tokyo, Japan, with Studio Arsis. 2009 has included "Bar La Barca"-written for the group by composer Eric Salzman and performed at Bargemusic this past June. Other area appearances include The New York Virtuoso Singers, Musica Sacra, New York Concert Singers, and the Bard Festival Singers.

Michael Reder - Bass Baritone, is a popular artist on concert and opera stages. Recent engagements include Simone in Gianni Schicchi (Puccini) with Chelsea Opera and Raphael in Haydn's Creation with the Waldorf Chorale. 

Mr. Reder made his Lincoln Center debut singing Mozart's Requiem at Alice Tully Hall. Recent solo orchestral engagements include Vaughan Williams' Five Mystical Songs and Dona Nobis Pacem, St. John Passion (Bach) and Ein Deutsches Requiem (Brahms). A specialist in renaissance and baroque music, Mr. Reder has performed with numerous early music ensembles including Early Music New York, The Tiffany Consort, My Lord Chamberlain's Consort, New York Baroque, Bach Vespers at Holy Trinity and The Nieuw Amsterdam Consort. He was a finalist in the 2003 Oratorio Society of New York Vocal  ompetition, performing in the Winners Concert at Carnegie Hall. 

Marcia Young was cited by the Washington Post for her “elegant, dark-hued soprano voice” and “winning mixture of formal restraint and emotional intensity.” She is a founding member of My Lord Chamberlain’s Consort, Duo Marchand (with lutenist Andy Rutherford), and the medieval trio Trefoil. In recent seasons Young has appeared with the Folger Consort, Parthenia, Piffaro, and the Newberry Consort; at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters, the Center for Jewish History, the Yale Center for British Art, the CityMusic Series in Columbus, the Yale University Collection of Musical Instruments, Amherst and Boston Early Music Festivals, the Ars Antiqua series in Chappaqua, New York, the HotShops gallery space in Omaha, and the Lute Society of America Conference and Seminar in Cleveland. Young has taught at the San Francisco Early Music Society’s summer workshop. During the academic year she serves as director of performance studies at Stern College, Yeshiva University. Also a music journalist, Young writes regularly for Opera News, Playbill, and Chamber Music America.

Leah Gale Nelson, violin and baroque violin, specializes in historical performance practice of the 17th and 18th centuries.  A semi-coastal musician based in New York, she has performed as a chamber musician and soloist throughout North America and in Europe, and is in demand as concertmaster throughout the United States for her interpretations of baroque and classical music.  In Minneapolis, she is Concertmaster and Artistic Advisor for Ensemble Sebastian and in 2004 was appointed String Artist in Residence at the Basilica of St. Mary.  She has been concertmaster with Chicago Opera Theater for productions in Chicago and New York; a guest director for Lyra Baroque Orchestra in Minneapolis; has led Handel's Messiah throughout the country; concertmaster for some of the finest choirs in New York City in repertoire from Monteverdi to Mozart; and guest lecturer at Columbia University, Vassar College, the College of St. Benedict/St. John's University, and the Schubert Club in St. Paul.  She has performed and recorded with leading early music ensembles throughout the United States, including Concert Royal, the Boston Camerata, the Smithsonian Chamber Orchestra, and the American Classical Orchestra.  Born in Texas and raised in Minnesota, Leah holds a Bachelor of Music degree from Chicago Musical College and a Master of Music degree from the Mannes College of Music in New York.