Virtuosos of Violin and Verse

Robert Eisenstein has led over 200 productions and performances with Folger Consort over the past 40 years include Measure + Dido at the Kennedy Center and Napa Valley Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice at Strathmore, The Fairy Queen, and Hildegard Von Bingen’s Ordo Virtutum at the Washington National Cathedral. Director of the Five College Early Music Program; Music Director for the Five College Opera Project production of Francesca Caccini’s La Liberazione di Ruggiero; former faculty member of Mount Holyoke College, where he taught music history and performed the viola de gamba, violin, and medieval fiddle. He is an active participant in the Five College Medieval Studies. Recipient of Early Music America’s Thomas Binkley Award for outstanding achievement in performance and scholarship by the director of a college early music ensemble.

Rose Solari (Poet) is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, The Last Girl, Orpheus in the Park, and Difficult Weather; the one-act play, Looking for Guenevere, and a novel, A Secret Woman. She has lectured and taught writing workshops at many institutions, including Arizona State University’s Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing; the University of Maryland, College Park; St. John’s College, Annapolis; the Jung Society of Washington; and the Centre for Creative Writing at Oxford University’s Kellogg College. As an actor, she has appeared in staged readings as the title character in two Grace Cavalieri plays: Anna and Mary Wollstonecraft: Hyena in Petticoats. In her writing for the stage, she has collaborated with modern dance artists, composers, and musicians. Her awards include the Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize, and Academy of American Poets’ University Prize, The Columbia Book Award, an EMMA award for excellence in journalism, and multiple grants.