Concert: Sospiri di Mostri

Janna Kysilko

Janna Kysilko, soprano, is the co-founder and director of Sospiri Early Music. She has appeared in several early opera roles, including Flerida in Cavalli’s Erismena at the Amherst Early Music Festival, Amore in Gagliano’s La Dafne with Bold North Baroque Opera, Euridice in Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice at Eastman Opera Workshop, and was contracted to perform in Lyra Baroque Orchestra’s covid-canceled Jomelli Requiem. With interests that expand beyond early music, Janna has given several song recitals for organizations such as the Schubert Club, Thursday Musical, and the Women in Music Festival in Rochester, NY. She has appeared as a soloist with the Minnesota Philharmonic Orchestra and the Macalester Festival Chorale, and performed in more modern operatic roles such as Mabel in Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance and Jenny in Sondheim’s Company. Awarded a McKnight grant in 2022, she was able to participate in the International Music Encounters program at Casa de Mateus in Portugal.

Having completed a bachelors in music and Germanic studies at Macalester College, Janna went on to complete a master’s at the Eastman School of Music, where she had the opportunity to work with early music specialists Paul O’Dette and Kristian Bezuidenhout, and studied voice with Dr. Robert McIver. After continuing bel canto vocal studies with the ledendary Emma Small, Janna expanded her early music technique under the tutelage of Spanish mezzo Nerea Berraondo, co-founder of Sospiri. Janna now resides in St. Paul, MN, where she is also a prominent trainer of dressage horses.

Joe Dolson

Joe Dolson is associate concertmaster of the Minnesota Philharmonic Orchestra. He has freelanced as a violinist within the Twin Cities since graduating from Macalester College in 2000, performing everything from high-concept performance art music with composer Franz Kamin, to classical and romantic string quartet music with the Elderberry String Quartet, to traditional English and Scottish Country Dance music. His forays into historical dance forms, in turn, led him to an interest in studying baroque performance practice with violinist Marc Levine.

Since developing an interest in baroque performance, Joe has studied baroque dance with Paige Whitley-Bauguess, and worked with Marc Destrubé, Ingrid Matthews, and Aisslinn Nosky studying baroque violin performance.

Joe also plays in a violin duo with MPO stand partner Catherine Himmerich. Together, they have worked extensively on sets of violin duos by diverse artists such as Violet Archer, Bela Bartok, Victoria Bond, Paul Hindemith, LeClair, and the Cure.

Phillip Rukavina

Phillip Rukavina performs as a lute and vihuela soloist and as a continuo lutenist. He’s appeared at many music festivals specializing in early music, including the Utrecht Early Music Festival (2013) and the Boston Early Music Festival (2015). In 2017, Phillip was invited to perform as a soloist at the European Lute Festival in Füssen, Germany (2017) and at the Lute Society of America’s 2017 WestFest held in Victoria, BC Canada.

Phillip is a founding member of the Venere Lute Quartet and has performed with many prominent ensembles, including the Newberry Consort, the Texas Early Music Project, the Rose Ensemble, the Bach Society MN and with renowned sopranos Emma Kirkby and Ellen Hargis. He has served on the faculty of the Lute Society of America’s LuteFest in Cleveland, OH and the Amherst and Vancouver Early Music Festivals. He has recorded on the Lyrichord, LSA, and Naxos labels. His fifth Studio395 solo release, Dutch Light: the Lute Music of Nicolas Vallet, was issued in winter of 2017.

Steven Zubich

Steven Zubich enjoys a dynamic musical career. He is an alumnus of the Perpich Center for Arts Education in Golden Valley, Minnesota. He earned his Bachelor’s Degree in music with a minor in art history from the University of Minnesota-Duluth where he studied with Tracy Lipke-Perry and Alexander Chernyshev. At UMD, he received extensive musical training with supplemental coursework in collaborative piano, pedagogy, musicology, theory, and composition.

He was the winner of the Concerto and Aria competition and was awarded a Matinee Musicale scholarship. His studies continued at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where he earned his Master’s of Music in Piano Performance. He studied under the tutelage of Venezuelan concert pianists Elena Abend and Judith Jaimes. 

Zubich’s vocations include performing, composing, teaching, and administration. His incidental compositions have been performed with theatrical companies such as Phantom Chorus, Lakeshore abd Wayward Theater. He is a faculty member at MacPhail Center for Music and the Saint Paul Conservatory. From 2017 through 2024, Zubich managed the Northern Lights Music Festival in his Minnesota homeland. He has organized over 150 classical music performances throughout the Iron Range since his tenure with NLMF.

Daryl Yoder

Virginia-born bass-baritone Daryl Yoder was raised in southern Africa and received his musical training at the Oberlin Conservatory and Boston University. He has performed in concert and opera across the eastern U.S. as well as in Europe and Botswana, appearing with the Bach Choir of Bethlehem, Apollo’s Fire, Opera Lancaster, Columbus Bach Ensemble, Opera Henriette, Three Notch’d Road, Handel Choir of Baltimore, Bel Cantanti Opera, the Maryland Choral Society and many others.

Especially noted for his work in Baroque music, recent seasons have included leading roles in John Blow’s Venus & Adonis, Cavalli’s L’Erismena, and the modern premier of Georg Reutter’s Dafne as well as multiple appearances in Bach’s Passions and B Minor Mass. He has premiered works by Jasmine Barnes, Tawnie Olson, Joshua Bornfield, Douglas Buchanan and many others, creating the role of Frank Spearman in Frances Pollock’s opera Stinney which was performed at the PROTOTYPE Festival for new opera in New York. During a residency in the Czech Republic he had the opportunity to give modern premieres of music by 18th-century Bohemian composers Šimon Brixi, Cajetanus Vogel and Leonardo Leo with the Consortium musicum Plzeň and the Kolegium pro duchovní hudbu.

Daryl has a special affection for the recital stage where his performances have included the complete song cycles of Schubert and Schumann, the American premiere of Imogen Holst’s Four Elizabethan Songs, and more than 250 other works by composers from Beethoven to Robert Owens to Vítězslava Kaprálová. As an in-demand ensemble singer, he has sung with the professional choirs of the Handel & Haydn Society, Emmanuel Music (Boston), Apollo’s Fire, Chantry, and The District 8. He is resident bass and part of the artistic team of Third Practice, a vocal consort specializing in both baroque and newly composed music.

Matthew Kessen

Matthew “Reverend Matt” Kessen is the writer, producer, star, and caterer of the Twin-Cities based series “Reverend Matt’s Monster Science.” Reverend Matt’s Monster Science – “Part comedy. Part science. All monsters” – is a multimedia series of comedy lectures on the grand and wondrous subject of monsters. It has appeared at museums, libraries, conventions, comedy festivals, and theater festivals in many parts of the country, including the Science Museum of Minnesota, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Twin Cities Horror Festival, and the Fringe Festivals in Minnesota, Green Bay, and Tucson, where it won Best Solo Show two years in a row. 

He has also worked as a dramaturg and actor with many Twin Cities theater companies, including Comedy Suitcase, Green T Productions, and the Winding Sheet Outfit. On his off time he works as a time-traveling bounty hunter with his cyborg Protoceratops sidekick.