Irvin E. Gilman, co-founding member (with Mary Lou Saetta) and flutist with Capitol Chamber Artists holds a Bachelor of Music degree from Oberlin College Conservatory of Music and a Master of Music degree from the Manhattan School of Music. He was 12 years assistant principal flutist with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, 15 years principal flute with the Albany Symphony Orchestra and Professor of Music at the State University of NY at Albany and Bennington College. Mr. Gilman has performed with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Symphony of the Air, American Ballet Theater, Royal Ballet Orchestra. He may be heard in solo and chamber music recordings on Centaur and Albany Records. Mr. Gilman was in residence two summers with Capitol Chamber Artists at the JAZZ TO CLASSICS FESTIVAL in Fairbanks, Alaska. Irvin Gilman is a published poet. Gilman’s poetry inspired by music is featured in his collection, IMAGINE A FLUTE. Mr. Gilman performed in Boston with CCA as a winner of SoHIP (Society for Historically Informed Performance).  --Photo by Ron Barnell

Mary Lou Saetta, violinist and co-founding member (with Irvin Gilman) of Capitol Chamber Artists holds a Bachelor and Master of Music from the Eastman School of Music. Her teachers include Joseph Knitzer, Carroll Glenn, Robert Gerle and Aaron Rosand. Saetta was a Tanglewood Fellow. Saetta is a past faculty member Union College and the College of St. Rose. She has performed with the Vermont Symphony, NY City Ballet Orchestra, Saratoga Performing Arts Center Orchestra, Rochester Philharmonic and Rochester Opera Under the Stars Orchestra, Lake George Opera Orchestra, Charlotte (N.C.) Symphony Orchestra and the Albany Symphony Orchestra. Saetta may be heard in solo and chamber music recordings for Centaur and Albany Records. Saetta was in residence two summers with Capitol Chamber Artists at the JAZZ TO CLASSICS FESTIVAL in Fairbanks, Alaska. Ms. Saetta performed in Boston with CCA as a winner of SoHIP.

André Laurent O’Neil, cello, has extensive experience as both soloist and continuo player. He works with New Trinity Baroque, Boston’s Handel and Haydn Society and has played with the European groups Les Perruques d’Amsterdam, and L’Orfeo Barock Orchester. André has also performed with the period instrument chamber ensembles Repast, Duo Seraphim, Bacchanalia, Ars Antiqua, Arc’Angelo. During the summer he regularly performs in Robert Conant’s Festival of Baroque Music in upstate New York, where a reviewer has praised “his lustrous ringing tone, facile technique and strong convincing grasp of the baroque style.” He has presented Bach’s six solo suites at the University at Albany. André graduated from Yale with honors and from the Early Music and Historical Performance Practice Program at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, Netherlands, where he studied with Jaap ter Linden. He has given baroque performance practice presentations and masterclasses at Columbia University, the University at Albany and the Brooklyn-Queens Conservatory of Music. André plays an original John Morrison violoncello (London, 1800), using a reconstruction of a c.1700 English bow.  --Photo by Richard Calmes

Alfred Fedak is a graduate of the Pingry School. He earned baccalaureate degrees in Performance and Music History with high honors from Hope College, and holds a master’s degree in Organ Performance from Montclair State University. He has done additional study at Westminster Choir College, at the Cambridge Choral Studies Seminar in Cambridge, England, and at the Institute for European Studies in Vienna, Austria. His principal organ teachers were Prudence Curtis, Roger Davis, Roger Rietberg, and Jon Gillock. He studied harpsichord and early music performance practice with Arthur Haas at the Eastman School of Music.

Mr. Fedak has held church and synagogue positions in New York, New Jersey, and Michigan, and currently serves as Minister of Music and Arts at Westminster Presbyterian Church on Capitol Hill in Albany, New York, where he directs the fine adult choir, plays the church’s historic four-manual 1929 E. M. Skinner pipe organ (restored and reinstalled by Austin Organs, Inc. in 2003), and oversees the church’s Ministry of Music and Arts.

A Fellow of the American Guild of Organists, Mr. Fedak also holds the AGO’s Choirmaster Certificate, and serves on the Guild’s Board of Examiners. Mr. Fedak has won many awards in organ performance and composition, including the AGO’s prestigious S. Lewis Elmer Award for national high score on Guild certification examinations. (His score of 95% on the AGO’s Fellowship paperwork remains the highest grade ever recorded on that seven-hour exam in the 108-year history of the Guild.) He won top honors in MTNA state and regional organ playing competitions, was a finalist in MTNA’s national auditions, and a winner in the Kalamazoo Bach Festival Competition. His compositions have earned prizes from the American Guild of Organists, the Hymn Society, St. John’s University (Collegeville, MN), the John Ness Beck Foundation, ASCAP, the Diocese of Lansing, and many others. In 1995 he was named a Visiting Fellow in Church Music by the Episcopal Seminary of the Southwest in Austin, Texas, and in 1999 was the recipient of an Individual Artist Grant in composition from the New York State Council on the Arts.

Mr. Fedak has published nearly 100 individual compositions, mostly sacred works for organ and for voices, which appear in the catalogs of a dozen different publishers. In addition, he has composed nearly 100 hymn tunes, which appear in many hymnals and collections throughout the US, Canada, England, Scotland, New Zealand, Japan, and Hong Kong. Two anthologies of his hymn tunes have been published by Selah Publishing Company of Pittsburgh: The Alfred V. Fedak Hymnary (1990), and Sing to the Lord No Threadbare Song (2002).