Joanna Marsden & Mark Edwards
Biography Joanna Marsden & Mark Edwards
Joanna Marsden
is a ‘fabulous’ (the Whole Note) flautist based in Montréal, Québec. She has performed recently in Belgium, Canada, Mexico, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States “beautifully” (Luis Gago, Madrid) and “with notable rhetorical clarity” (Boston Musical Intelligencer).
She is a founding member of Montréal’s Poiesis and Symphonie Atlantique, a conductorless chamber orchestra based in the Netherlands dedicated to Classical and Romantic repertoire led from the violin by Rebecca Huber. She has performed with Les Idées heureuses, Arion, Rezonance Baroque, Compagnie Baroque Mont-Royal, the Ottawa Baroque Consort, and Boston’s l’Académie and worked with conductors including Ton Koopman, Julian Prégardien, Florian Heyerick, and Peter van Heyghen among others. She collaborates with keyboardists Mark Edwards, Katelyn Clark, and Christophe Gauthier.
Her début CD, Devienne Sonatas with Mark Edwards, was issued by Centaur Records in February 2019 and has been warmly reviewed by Early Music America and the American Record Guide.
Her main teachers include Wilbert Hazelzet (Royal Conservatory of the Hague), Claire Guimond (Schulich School of Music of McGill University), and John Solum (Vassar College). She was the second prize winner of the 2012 National Flute Association’s Baroque Artist Competition in Las Vegas.
She has a doctorate in historical performance from McGill University’s Schulich School of Music. Her research centres on the performing practices and repertoire of the French Flute School of the nineteenth century seen through the lens of period instruments. She addresses a wide repertoire, playing antique flutes by Tortochot (Paris, ~1770), Claire Godfroy l’aîné (Paris, ~1820), Jean-Louis Tulou (Paris, ~1841) and Isidore Lot (Paris ~1870).
Mark Edwards
has presented solo recitals at numerous major festivals and series, among them the Utrecht Early Music Festival, Bozar, and the Montreal Baroque Festival and Clavecin en concert. He has performed concertos with prominent ensembles including Il Gardellino, Neobarock, and Ensemble Caprice, and he has played chamber music with Il Pomo d’Oro, Les Boréades de Montréal, and Flûtes Alors! His debut solo CD, Orpheus Descending, is due for release in 2016.
“Mark Edwards brings the listener to new and unpredictable regions, using all the resources of his instrument...of his virtuosity and of his imagination,” La Libre Belgique wrote in 2012.
A native of Canada, Edwards is a PhD candidate at Leiden University and the Orpheus Instituut, Ghent, where his studies focus on the intersection of memory, improvisation, and the concept of musical work. His teachers have included Robert Hill, William Porter, Hank Knox, and David Higgs.
