Paul L Althouse
A product of both Harvard and Yale. His undergraduate thesis was on Mahler; his PhD dissertation at Yale was on Carl Loewe. While at Yale he also helped found the Yale Bach Society, and he conducted its concerts for seven years. From 1970 thru 2012 he taught music history and theory and directed choral activities at Connecticut College in New London. He has now retired to Maine. He has written for us since 1976, and we have had the benefit of all his choral conducting experience. He has a special interest in Brahms and Schubert, as you may have noticed. He is also a church organist.
Allan Altman
For nearly 30 years Allan Altman has been the head of production for Video Artists International (VAI), supervising the release of hundreds of DVDs and CDs, mostly historic performances that had never before been available to the public. His activities for VAI have included researching archives, clearing media rights for commercial release, audio and video restoration, editing multi-language subtitles for operas, and contributing booklet notes.
He has also written reviews and articles for Opera News, Carnegie Hall programs and brochures, and other music-related publications. He considers the CD release of the 1951 world premiere performance of Britten’s Billy Budd–a project that grew out of his friendship with the first Billy, Theodor Uppman–among his proudest achievements.
His interest in opera and classical music began in his early teens, and he has collected recordings and attended performances since the mid-1970s. He earned a BA in Vocal Performance from Hunter College and also studied music at Rowan University, where he performed in a number of operas, most notably as Count Almaviva in The Marriage of Figaro. He has also worked as a vocal coach and produced or co-produced several recordings, including Berlin Lieder (a collection of Irving Berlin songs performed by Marilyn Horne, Robert White, and Dick Hyman). He resides in Manhattan with his husband of many years.
Alan Becker
He is a native of New York, where he attended the High School of Performing Arts and the Manhattan School of Music. His graduate degrees are from the University of Miami and Syracuse University.
For many years he directed the Fine Arts Department of the Broward County (Florida) main library. He has also written many music reviews for the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel. He was a member of the Artistic Advisory Committee of the Florida Philharmonic and president of the Recorded Music Society of South Florida, where he still lives.
He was attracted to ARG because he is upset about the “dumbing down” of classical music. His E-mail address is abdelius@earthlink.net, which tells of his love for Delius. But he reviews mainly piano recordings–his instrument.
Charles E Brewer
has taught since 1992 at the School of Music at Florida State University in Tallahassee. He earned his PhD in musicology from the City University of New York in 1984. His dissertation was on late Medieval Polish music, and he has published many articles on Medieval performance practice. He also contributed the article on Heinrich Biber to the New Grove Dictionary and has written liner notes for Sony and Harmonia Mundi.
Robert Delcamp
Robert Delcamp was born and grew up in Cincinnati, where his classical music education was nurtured by attending Cincinnati Symphony concerts every Saturday night during the years of Max Rudolf’s reign. As a high school student he was an avid bassoonist but eventually took up organ as he realized he would never be able to make a functional bassoon reed. He earned his Bachelor and Master degrees in organ performance at the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, studying with the legendary Wayne Fisher, and a DMus from Northwestern University. For 38 years he was Professor of Music and University Organist and Choirmaster at The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. Under his direction the University Choir made 10 recordings and undertook 12 tours of England, singing Choral Evensong in more than 25 cathedrals and abbey churches. He has played organ recitals around the US and Europe and made six solo CDs for Naxos (all reviewed in ARG!). He and his wife Susan are avid bibliophiles and enjoy living with their cats.
John Dutterer
He is the music editor at Daedalus Books and Music. That means he writes the blurbs about the recordings in their catalog and web site. In the process he has developed a critical faculty without an outlet. (The blurbs are simply to sell records.) So we think he can use us and we him. He will mostly cover chamber music for us. His experience in writing about music means that he will not cause us too much work in editing!
Stephen Estep
He worked on his Master of Music in piano performance at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio; his Bachelor of Arts is from Cedarville University. He stays busy as an accompanist and coach, working at several schools and colleges in southwestern Ohio. He has composed off and on over the years, with a full symphony completed at age 14. Patrick Hanudel, another of the Miami Mafia, has performed Stephen’s clarinet sonata, Technical Difficulties, on recitals. Stephen is also a book and record dealer and does a little website design as well. He’s an obsessive bookworm, neologist, punsmith, record collector, intractable joker, and writer of essays and songs. He’s probably the only ARG reviewer to have performed with an orchestra, played accordion in a Mexican gospel group, and handled banjo and bass in several country bands. Interests include Russian history, travel writing from the first third of the 20th Century, Mystery Science Theater 3000, Shostakovich, and theology.
Nathan Faro
He lives in Massachusetts, where he plays the viola in an orchestra and has sung in choirs (baritone). He got both his music degrees at the University of New Hampshire, studying with (among others) Rob Haskins. One degree was in composition, the other in musicology (2016). He is writing about new music for ARG.
Elliot Fisch
lives in California and has been a record collector for 50 years. He has several thousand classical, opera, and musical theatre recordings. Although he was a piano minor in school, his career has been in business. Through his business and personal travel he has visited all the world’s great concert halls and opera houses, and he is especially fond of vocal performances and musical theatre. As a long-time subscriber he has some idea what readers are looking for in a review.
Gil French
After 13 years of pathetic piano lessons, Gil French wound up stuck in a college seminary with only classical music allowed (sans Carmina Burana). So he gradually built a wide listening repertoire by comparing recordings of the same works. An MA in Music History was mere frosting on the music itself. In recent years he’s honed his ears even further through weekly reviews of records in area newspapers. He spent many years as an announcer at classical WXXI-FM in Rochester NY, where he still lives, and as host and producer of Rochester Philharmonic broadcasts. O Fortuna! His favorite instrument is the orchestra.
William J Gatens
Bill Gatens has been writing for ARG since 1990, with a specialty in organ and sacred choral music. He is Organist-Choirmaster (since 1991) at the Church of the Good Shepherd (Episcopal) in the Philadelphia Main Line suburb of Rosemont. In October 2001, he became organist for Congregation Adath Jeshurun in Elkins Park. From 1986 to 1997 he was an announcer for Philadelphia’s classical music station WFLN, until new ownership and imagined economic pressures brought a change of broadcast format. He is a graduate of Swarthmore College and Oxford University (D.Phil. 1983). Over the years he has contributed articles and reviews to Music and Letters, The American Organist, Victorian Studies, and Albion. Victorian Cathedral Music in Theory and Practice, a book based on his Oxford doctoral dissertation, was published in 1986 by Cambridge University Press. He is also a contributor to the second edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and the New Dictionary of National Biography. In addition to his church and synagogue work, he plays occasional organ recitals in the Philadelphia area and has appeared as harpsichordist with the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia.
Todd Gorman
Here is the the latest of our “Miami Mafia”–a considerable group of writers that graduated from Miami University here in Oxford, Ohio. (Our other mafia is the Eastman group.) He plays the flute and has won more than $10,000 in flute competitions. He has taken masterclasses with 16 key people in the field. He has performed in Carnegie Hall and in Europe. He has been part of a number of chamber ensembles and has made a few arrangements for flute. He lives in Tennessee–one of two ARG reviewers in the state.
Philip Greenfield
Armed with degrees from UMass and Johns Hopkins University, Phil Greenfield entered the gritty arena of the Maryland public schools a great many years. There he taught World Civ and Comparative Religion, though he found it harder and harder to tolerate the bureaucratic nitwits working so determinedly to ruin what’s left of public education. Phil retired from teaching in 2014 and now does admissions counseling for college-bound students and their families. A year as a Fulbright Exchange Teacher to England stiffened his upper lip and helped extend his career in the classroom. Since 1987 he has contributed arts criticism to The Baltimore Sun on a weekly basis. He has sung professionally as a soloist and in many choirs over the years, most notably at Washington DC’s National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. Since 1981 he has served as cantor at Mishkan Torah Synagogue, Greenbelt MD. He has reviewed choral music for ARG since 1993.
Patrick Hanudel
He is from Akron, Ohio, but now lives in San Antonio, Texas. He has had more than 20 years of experience in classical music as a performer, teacher, and writer. He has served as Principal Clarinet of the Tucson Symphony, attended the Tanglewood Music Center and Banff Arts Centre, and for three years taught clarinet and saxophone in the Houston public schools. His teachers include Michele Gingras of Miami University (Ohio), David Peck of the Houston Symphony, and Richie Hawley and Ron Aufmann of the Cincinnati Symphony.
For a number of years Mr Hanudel worked on a Doctorate in clarinet performance at the University of Cincinnati Conservatory and served as Principal Clarinet of the Columbus (Indiana) Philharmonic. In addition to his studies at CCM, he designed and administered the Masters oral exam for the clarinet studio, and he was a mentor and advisor to minority graduate students who needed assistance with their research-related writing skills. In his spare time, he enjoys playing chamber music with friends, discussing current events, and following Cleveland sports teams.
James Harrington
Mr Harrington has been a performing pianist for nearly half a century. His BA is in Music History and Theory, and he did graduate work in Musicology and Accompanying.
He has been an orchestral keyboardist, chamber music collaborator, accompanist, and occasional church organist. The other keyboard in his life has letters, numbers, and special characters and is the one that pays the mortgage. Harrington Software, Inc. is a New Jersey company that deals with public school districts.
A major career high point was giving the world premiere of the original French version of an early Rachmaninoff song in Paris (1998)–still never published or recorded. He has also publicly performed all of Rachmaninoff’s music written or arranged for one piano, four hands. That project culminated in appearances at the 1999 Newport Music Festival in Rhode Island.
Rob Haskins
is a professor and coordinator of graduate studies for the music department of the University of New Hampshire. He holds a DMA in harpsichord and a PhD in musicology from Eastman. (In fact, he is the heart of our “Eastman mafia”, because he has recommended so many reviewers to us.) He has written for ARG since 1993 and has reviewed harpsichord and piano music as well as 20th Century music (especially Cage, Glass, and Reich). He has recorded for Leonarda, Cantaloupe, and Mode. He has published a book on John Cage. His other interests include film, fine dining, and pets.
Roger Hecht
He lives just outside Boston and worked over the course of his life as an orchestral trombonist and as a reference librarian, which he calls “the perfect job for someone who knows a little about everything and not much about anything”. He discovered music in his high school band program and later majored in Music Education at Syracuse University and studied trombone at Eastman School of Music. He played bass trombone with the Syracuse Symphony and Lake George Opera, and has been freelancing in Boston for several years.
He is quite interested in audio; he builds his own tube amplifiers and is very devoted to vinyl recordings.
He is especially fond of orchestral music and opera, especially modern American, British, and German tonal composers through the middle of the century and many of the romantics.
He is an avid reader and has written two novels and several stories. He rides a bicycle year-round (hates cars).
Ned Kellenberger
Ned Kellenberger completed a doctorate in violin performance in 2018. He teaches violin and he has been concertmaster in a few orchestras. He spent 2020 in Singapore, teaching at the Wolfgang Violin Studio. He now teaches at the Leopold Auer Music Academy in Kansas City. He is a certified teacher of the Alexander Technique and he is a member of the St Petersburg Quartet.
Barry Kilpatrick
Since Barry Kilpatrick has been writing for American Record Guide (1989) he has reviewed many hundreds of recordings, mostly of brass. He is Associate Professor of Trombone and Euphonium at the State University of New York at Fredonia, where the School of Music has some 475 music majors. He is also Principal Trombonist of the Erie Philharmonic and Fredonia Chamber Players and a member of the Fredonia Faculty Brass. He often tours with Keith Brion and his New Sousa Band. He has a recording, American Music for Euphonium. For many summers he has taught at the Pennsylvania Governor’s School for the Arts (Mercyhurst College in Erie), serving a long time as Chair of the Music Department. He and wife Cathe have two adult children. To take his mind off work sometimes, he likes to jog, play golf, and work in the garden.
Bradley Lehman
Bradley Lehman grew up in Indiana and has lived in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia since 1996. His doctorate from Michigan is in harpsichord performance, with experience in all the other early keyboards along the way. He has composed a lot of church music, some of it published. When not playing classical and jazz records too loudly for his wife and children, he has a full-time career as a developer of business software and sporadically plays in contract bridge tournaments. Dr Lehman’s professional legacy is probably going to be his discovery in 2004 of a keyboard temperament in Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. His research papers and demonstrations from that problem-solving venture have been received well. His own CDs as harpsichordist and organist are available.
Ralph Locke
Ralph Locke loves to write for the general music-loving public. During his college years, he contributed to several Boston publications, including the Phoenix. He then took a detour into academic musicology, earning his graduate degrees at University of Chicago and, for 40 years, teaching at the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music. He has written or edited four books, and six of his scholarly articles have won the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for excellence in writing about music. He continues to write scholarly articles and to edit the book series Eastman Studies in Music (University of Rochester Press). He now lives in the Washington DC area and is a Research Affiliate at the University of Maryland. He began sending reviews sporadically to ARG because he wanted the world to know about this or that unusual recording that he had heard. Since 2015 he has been contributing more regularly. His tastes are wide-ranging: art song, French and Italian opera, 20th Century American music, and much more.
Peter V Loewen
A native of Canada, Mr Loewen teaches music at Rice University–Medieval, Renaissance, and baroque music, as well as a course on non-Western music. He earned his PhD in Historical Musicology from USC, with a dissertation on late Medieval music. His instrument is the double bass.
Joseph Magil
was born in Western Michigan but has lived in Los Angeles for many years. He is a violinist and violist with degrees in music and art history. He has played in many a chamber ensemble and some orchestras, mostly in Michigan. He has taught violin. Like a number of us, he spent a few years as a classical music radio announcer. He joined ARG in 1996.
Catherine Moore
After earning degrees in English literature and organ performance, Catherine Moore completed a PhD in musicology at the University of Liverpool (England). Her doctoral thesis on the 17th Century composer Michelangelo Rossi was published as a book by Garland in 1993, and she wrote the article on him for the revised New Grove. She has also been involved in the music business since 1981 and has her own marketing consulting firm. At New York University she taught graduate courses in Music Business. She has now retired to her native Toronto.
David Moore
played principal cello for the Queens Symphony Orchestra for almost 40 years. He is a Juilliard graduate, studied cello with Leonard Rose, viola da gamba with John Hsu, conducting with Jorge Mester, and musicology at NYU (ABD). He has taught at Cornell (he was born in Ithaca), Southampton College, York College (CUNY), and William Paterson University and the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music. He has recorded for five record labels and was a member of the Kohon Quartet. For many years he played the cello for the Broadway production of Les Miserables.
Mr Moore has written for ARG since 1969, reviewing a wide range of music. His interest in music of all kinds is insatiable. He lives with his wife Sharon in West Nyack, New York.
Robert A Moore
studied English, Music, and Philosophy as an undergraduate and served as pastor of United Methodist congregations in New England after he graduated from Boston University School of Theology in 1971, retiring to Maine in 2011. Both parents were pianists, so music filled the home from before his birth. As a child he would hunker down for hours in front of the family “hi-fi” entranced by Beethoven. He bought his first recording in 1958 and has since amassed a collection of vast proportion. (One life task now is to divest of as much as he can.) He has played various musical instruments, sung in choirs, and frequented Symphony Hall and Jordan Hall in Boston since he was young. He writes program notes for concerts. Among his strongest interests are English vocal music, lieder, and choral music, all of which he reviews for ARG. He also enjoys travel, cinema, and gardening.
Don O’Connor
Don O’Connor was born in London, England to Irish parents. He became a US citizen in 1954. In 1963 and 1964 he got his Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees in Industrial Design from Syracuse University, where he also studied post-graduate level musicology. He won five national kitchen and bath design awards and in 2007 was inducted into the National Kitchen and Bath Industry Hall of Fame.
His lifelong interest in classical music included a time as the music critic for the Syracuse Post-Standard (1967-1971) and the Syracuse Herald Journal (1971-73). From 1977 to 1980 he wrote a local record review column. He joined ARG in 2006.
From 1974 to 1978, he was the tympanist and program annotator for the Susquehanna Valley (now Williamsport) Symphony Orchestra and from 1980 to 1985 choir director at St Peter Lutheran Church in Kreamer PA, where he still lives. He was also a contributor to the Millennium Edition of Groves Dictionary. He is a member of the Havergal Brian and Felix Draeseke Societies.
Bruno Repp
Born in Vienna, Austria, he came to these shores in 1969. After obtaining doctorates in psychology from both the Universities of Vienna and Chicago he conducted research in a private laboratory until 2011. His nearly 200 published articles deal with speech perception, expression in piano performance, rhythm, timing, and synchronization. At home he has been playing the piano all his life for his own enjoyment and has had his fingers in nearly all standard (and also some less familiar) repertoire, though not in virtuosic pieces. Those he knows from much listening and attending many hundreds of concerts. He has also played piano duets and chamber music with his violinist daughter. His musical interests encompass solo, chamber, orchestral, and vocal music from Bach to Shostakovich, but not Baroque, religious, Second Viennese School, and contemporary music (with some exceptions). A special hobby for over 50 years has been to compare different performances, in order to keep only the very best in his record collection. He also loves to follow piano competitions on the Internet and make his own predictions. When not engaged with music he enjoys reading, walking, taking photographs, strong beer, his wife’s superb Asian cooking, solving Sudoku, and playing games such as chess and Ticket to Ride.
David Reynolds
David Reynolds is the son of English (father) and Austrian (mother) immigrants so there was always music of one kind or another in the home. He graduated from Western Michigan University with a BA in English and a double minor in Elementary Education and German. After teaching in Atlanta, GA for eight years, he moved to Los Angeles, CA to pursue film and television work. Some TV shows he appeared on are Arrested Development, Chuck, Victorious, and Monk. He also acted in Rob Zombie’s House of 1,000 Corpses, Hills Have Eyes II, and Sushi Girl, among other films. In addition to being an actor and teacher, David has been an opera nut since he was 9 years old. Introduced to opera via Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel, he began collecting first LPs and then CDs, amassing a huge collection. He now lives in Michigan and continues to act and direct in local productions. He loves all opera, choral music, Shakespeare, and classic movies (especially silent films). When he isn’t listening to opera, he’s usually listening to old time radio shows.
Jack Sullivan
He has a PhD in English from Columbia and is Chair of American Studies at Rider University, but his real passion has always been music. He moved to New York from Greenville, South Carolina mainly so he could go to concerts–a decision he has never regretted. In addition to writing for ARG, he contributes frequently to the New York Times Book Review and Washington Post Book World and is Program Annotator for the New Jersey Symphony. His books include Elegant Nightmares, a study of the English ghost story; Words on Music, a collection of essays on music chosen for their literary quality; and New World Symphonies, a study of how American culture changed European music. He is married to writer-editor Robin Bromley and is the weary but happy father of two boys, who were daily indoctrinated in great music.
Michelle Dulak Thomson
She began playing the violin at age 4 and attended the Pre-College Division of The Juilliard School for 8 years. She earned a degree in mechanical engineering at the University of California at Berkeley; but the lure of the Music Department proved too strong for her, and when she returned to Berkeley (after a year in London, studying violin with Emanuel Hurwitz and viola with Garfield Jackson), it was as a graduate student in musicology. Alongside her graduate work, she was a founding writer for and sometime editor of the online classical music review magazine San Francisco Classical Voice (www.sfcv.org).
Since moving to Oregon more than ten years ago she has continued as a freelance violinist, violist, and writer about music. Her other interests include model sailplanes, mysteries of the Golden Age and onward, and GK Chesterton.
Donald Vroon
He grew up in the New York area, the son of immigrants. Only classical music was allowed in the home. Love of music and serious religious commitment drew him into dual careers. After a ThM from Princeton in 1968 there were many years as a Methodist minister and even three years teaching Christian Ethics at a major university. There were ten years as a radio announcer at classical FM stations. In one he was Record Librarian.He began writing for ARG in 1983 and became Editor in 1987. He has also written for other publications. Other strong interests include travel, beer and wine, and reading. He is a swimmer. He lives in Cincinnati for the low cost, the climate, and the orchestra.He took piano lessons, as so many people did, but decided he would never be a good pianist, so gave it up. He has read orchestral scores since he was 13, and the sound of the orchestra is his favorite sound.
Stephen Wright’s
fascination with classical music began in his late teens after he found a compilation of
Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven piano sonatas tucked away in an old forgotten stack of sheet music. Though some of it was beyond his rudimentary pianism, it revealed music of great power, subtlety of expression, and exhilarating virtuosity and complexity far surpassing the commercial pop and rock music he grew up with. He soon began collecting classical CDs and over the next 20 years acquired over 15,000 discs. He doesn’t play the piano much anymore, but keeps his fingers busy as a legal transcriptionist and court reporter, and makes his home in peaceful rural Oregon.