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Photo note: To download a photo of Chancey, see end of release.

Rare, early music instrument to be featured in May 12 concert

CHAPEL HILL – In Louis XIV’s fashion-conscious France, aristocratic ladies surely could not rest a violin – or anything else – on their bare shoulders.

So craftsmen invented the pardessus de voile, a five-stringed hybrid of the voil and the violin, which could rest demurely on a silk-skirted lap. Eighteenth-century damsels used the fretted instrument to play violin sonatas by Arcangelo Corelli and Jean-Marie Leclair, which were taking France by storm at the time.

On May 12, Triangle music lovers will have a chance to hear and observe this rare instrument when Dr. Tina Chancey performs on the pardessus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. With Webb Wiggins, who teaches harpsichord at Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, Chancey will give a free public concert at 8 p.m. in Person Recital Hall,

The duo will play baroque music by Johann Sebastian Bach, Marin Marias, Corelli and Leclair, showcasing the perdessus’ throaty sound -- not unlike that of a human voice, said Brent Wissick, UNC associate professor of music.

"Dr. Chancey wrote her dissertation on the pardessus, and she also specializes in the viola da gamba and other early bowed stringed instruments," Wissick said. "She owns an original pardessus made in France in 1745."

Chancey, of Arlington, Va., has played the instrument for 20 years and won two solo recitalist grants from the National Endowment for the Arts to perform pardessus concerts. Those took place across the country and at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Carnegie Hall, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian Institution.

She is a former member of New York’s Ensemble for Early Music, which has been profiled on CBS’s "Sunday Morning" and ABC’s "Nightline," and of the New York Renaissance Band and the Folger Consort, the musical performing arm of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.

Chancey has recorded for the Windham Hill, Arabesque and Dorian labels. Reviews for her concerts have included the following by the Washington Post: "Chancey, her every phrase beautifully shaped, stretched the music’s refined vocabulary to the limit." The New York Times reported, "Ms. Chancey played quick movements deftly, and there was much to admire in her stylish ornamentation and careful shaping of the adagios and sarabandes."

For more information about the concert, call 962-1039.

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Photo url: http://www.unc.edu/news/pics/visiting/chancey_tina050203.jpg

Contact: Brent Wissick, 962-1070