The Music of Baroque plan do presentations about conducting and leadership, one for students on the morning of January 30, and the other for parents and guests on the evening of January 30. “These will be interactive, multimedia presentations,” said Stephen Alltop who is a conductor at the Music of Baroque, the Apollo Chorus of Chicago, the Champaign-Urbana Symphony, the Elmhurst Symphony Orchestra and a Conducting Faculty of the Bienen School of Music at Northwestern, who also taught music teacher Kingsley Tang at Northwestern, “that we hope will help shed light on how conductors lead musicians and how musicians communicate with each other.” Several volunteers will also have a chance to take a short conducting lesson and lead the nine-member of Music of the Baroque musicians.

Parker reached out to the Music of the Baroque last year about doing a residency at Parker, similar to what was done the previous year with the Lincoln Center Chamber Music. Parker conducts an invited ensemble residency every year, which includes rehearsals, concerts, teaching experiences with students and concert attendance.

The Joan W. Harris Visiting Scholar in Residence event started last year. The planning of this event starts with discussions with Joan W. Harris to collaborate and set a vision for each year’s coloration. Then, meetings follow with various art organizations and coordinating with Parker. The Music of the Baroque share Joan W. Harris as a donor, as well as “philosophical goals” with Parker, as Tang said.

The event’s goal is “to connect with another arts organization in the community, bring to life the tradition and artistry of classical music to Parker,” Tang said. “And enrich the lives of Parker students and the wider Parker community with great music.”

As one of the few groups in the country devoted to performing sixteenth eighteenth-century works, both vocal and instrumental, “Music of the Baroque” is consistently among Chicago’s leading classical music groups, according to the group’s website. The Chicago Sun-Times wrote about the Music of the Baroque, that “Lyric Opera of Chicago and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra may be the big guys on the local classical music scene, but in terms of sheer quality of performance … Music of the Baroque inhabits the same stratosphere,” and Opera News calls Music of the Baroque “one of Chicago’s musical glories.”

According to their Wikipedia page, the ensemble was created as a program of the choir of the Church of St. Paul and the Redeemer in Hyde Park by Thomas S. Wilkman in 1972. It was incorporated as a nonprofit organization in 1975. Jane Glover was named Music Director in September 2002 and William Jon Gray was named chorus director in 2010. Karen Fishman has served as the organization’s executive director since 1999.

Jane Glover has been Music of the Baroque’s music director since 2002. According to her biography on the group’s website, Glover has conducted all the major symphony and chamber orchestras in Britain, as well as orchestras in Europe, the United States, Asia, and Australia. She made her professional debut at the Wexford Festival in 1975, conducting her own edition of Cavalli’s L’Eritrea. She was also the artistic director of the London Mozart Players from 1984 to 1991 and has held principal conductor ships of both the Huddersfield and the London Choral Societies. And from 2009 until 2016, she was director of opera at the Royal Academy of Music, where she is now Felix Mendelssohn Visiting Professor.   

Over around four decades, according to the Music of Baroque’s website,  Music of the Baroque has “presented premiere and revival performances of many early masterpieces—among them Claudio Monteverdi’s operas and 1610 Vespers, Georg Philipp Telemann’s Day of Judgment, Mozart’s Idomeneo, and numerous Handel operas and oratorios.” The ensemble has drawn praise throughout its history for its performances of the major choral works of J. S. Bach and Handel.

Listeners around the country enjoyed the Music of the Baroque through radio broadcasts and recordings on 98.7 WFMT Radio, according to the group’s website. The group also has an Emmy-nominated DVD, “A Renaissance Christmas.”