Robert Mealy, violin
One of America’s most prominent baroque violinists, Robert Mealy has been praised for his “imagination, taste, subtlety, and daring” by The Boston Globe. The New Yorker called him “New York’s world-class early music violinist.”
Mr. Mealy began exploring early music in high school, first with the collegium of UC Berkeley and then at the Royal College of Music in London, where he studied harpsichord and baroque violin. While still an undergraduate at Harvard College, he was asked to join the Canadian baroque orchestra Tafelmusik. Since then, he has recorded and toured with a wide range of distinguished early music ensembles both here and in Europe, and led orchestras for Masaaki Suzuki, William Christie, Andrew Parrott, Paul Agnew, Nicholas McGegan, and Helmuth Rilling, among many others.
A frequent leader and soloist, Mr. Mealy is principal concertmaster at Trinity Wall Street, which has now begun their second multi-year survey of the complete Bach cantatas. He is also Orchestra Director of the Grammy Award-winning Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra, which he has led in a decade of festival performances and recordings. The Boston Phoenix remarked of one BEMF production that “the most exceptional music came from the pit. Concertmaster Robert Mealy played more music than anyone onstage or off, every measure of it with erudition and compelling energy.” He has appeared at international music festivals from Berkeley to Belgrade, and from Melbourne to Edinburgh; most summers, he is a featured performer at Les Jardins du William Christie. His most recent project with BEMF, a sensational opera by Graupner, was just released this month.
Mr. Mealy is co-director of the seventeenth-century ensemble Quicksilver, whose debut recording, Stile Moderno, was hailed as “breakthrough recording of the year” by the Huffington Post. He has been Director of Juilliard’s distinguished Historical Performance Program since 2009 and has led his students in tours around the globe. From 2003 to 2015, he directed the postgraduate Yale Baroque Ensemble and the Yale Collegium Musicum. Prior to that, he taught at Harvard for over a decade, where he founded Harvard Baroque. In 2004, he received EMA’s Binkley Award for outstanding teaching and scholarship. He has recorded over 80 CDs on most major labels. He still likes to practice.