John Dornenburg, Viola da gamba
After many years as a San Francisco Bay Area performer, teacher, and recording artist, John Dornenburg now resides in the Cotswold region of the United Kingdom. He has made over thirty CDs of both solo and chamber music on all sizes of viola da gamba and violone, three of which feature virtuoso music for the unaccompanied bass viol. As a viola da gamba soloist he has performed in Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands, Turkey, Lebanon, Australia, New Zealand, and across the U.S.A., including appearances at the Istanbul International Festival, Krakow Festival, York Early Music Festival, Kilkenny Festival, Melbourne International Festival, Monadnock Festival, and Berkeley Early Music Festival. In addition to chamber music concerts, he has frequently performed the obbligato viol parts in J.S. Bach’s St. Matthew and St. John Passions with organizations that include the San Francisco Symphony, Oregon Bach Festival, and Carmel Bach Festival.
John has been featured as a guest artist with many ensembles across the USA, and he is the director of the Sex Chordæ Consort of Viols, founder of the Baroque ensemble Music’s Re-creation, and co-founder of the Archetti Baroque String Ensemble. He has been music director for productions of Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610 and Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas (both for the Renaissance and Baroque Society of Pittsburgh), and in 2005 he conducted four fully-staged performances of Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea at California State University, Sacramento. He has edited three published collections of 17th-century music for viol consort by John Hingeston for PRB Productions, and has contributed reviews and articles to the Journal of Seventeenth Century Music and Early Music America.
From 1988-2018 John held the position of Lecturer in Viola da gamba at Stanford University, and more recently was appointed Instructor of Violone at the University of California, Berkeley, where he also co-directed the University Baroque Ensemble for one year. John has taught music history on the faculties of Carnegie-Mellon University and the California State University at Sacramento, where he specialized in pre-Classical Era history and literature and Jazz history. He was an adjunct faculty member at the University of Washington in Seattle, and Artist-in-Residence at Melbourne University’s Early Music Studio in Australia. John is a frequent faculty member at music workshops such as the Viola da Gamba Society Conclave and Viols West, and he has also taught at the Amherst Early Music Workshop, Aston Magna, and at both the Medieval-Renaissance and the Baroque Summer Workshops of the San Francisco Early Music Society. For eleven years he directed the Stanford Viol Workshop.
He was awarded the Soloist’s Diploma for his studies with Wieland Kuijken at the Koninklijk Konservatorium in Den Haag, Holland, and he also studied Baroque performance practice with Nikolaus Harnoncourt at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria.