"A musical live wire - one heck of a
harpsichordist and a lively conductor."
Boston Globe
"A true Mozartian. Her Mozart achieves a
near-perfect combination of real dramatic cogency and the ability to
sing."
Fanfare
"The ‘Jupiter’ [Symphony of Mozart] was an
aristocratic knockout. Sorrell has re-thought the piece even since she
and her players recorded the work for Koch Classics (also a fine
performance.) She now achieves phrasings, blends and accents that
animate every corner of this masterpiece. The orchestra played with
crackling vitality and dulcet lyricism..."
Cleveland Plain Dealer
"The group’s semi-staged performance, lead by
music director Jeannette Sorrell, proved revelatory, with impassioned
singing and playing bringing Bach’s score to life with contemporary
immediacy."
Opera News
"If Handel’s Messiah transcends the usual
categories to be a fixture of our general culture, so Jeannette
Sorrell transcends mere historicism in her performances of this music.
Her triumph Saturday night had fresh impulses and took risks."
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"Monteverdi’s Orfeo was a triumph for Jeannette
Sorrell, showing us new dimensions of her genius."
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"The group had amazingly clear musical
direction. We must give credit to Jeannette Sorrell for her fresh and
lively vision...Not only does Apollo’s Fire play with fire and
passion, but their musical offering is nectar of the gods. Their
playing was super-animated and electric."
Los Alamos Monitor
"Chief among the stars was conductor Jeannette
Sorrell. Sorrell conducts like she’s willing something magical to
happen. The festival orchestra played with a burnished string sound
and wind playing that was jewel-like in clarity."
Winston-Salem Journal
"When Sorrell arrives onstage, she grabs the
attention of her musicians, who respond with missionary enthusiasm,
and her listeners...It is no exaggeration to say that Sorrell and her
inspired band provide the most consistently compelling artistic
experiences in Cleveland’s classical-music scene."
Cleveland Plain Dealer
"...this Mozart verged on the revelatory,
especially Sorrell’s account of the Symphony No.40....Each movement
had a sense of inner life and drama, and every instrumental line could
be heard. The finale was the explosive, stormy creation Mozart must
have intended it to be."
Cleveland Plain Dealer
"Sorrell’s brilliance was stamped on every
aspect of the performance....She must be one of the best conductors
around in this repertoire."
Cleveland Plain Dealer
"Sorrell, who looks like a pre-Raphaelite figure
with her tousled mane of coppery hair, might have been a dancer in a
previous life - when she conducts, her arms describe musical phrases
with gracefully sculpted gestures. She is, in fact, one heck of a
harpsichordist and a lively conductor."
The Boston Globe
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Conductor and
harpsichordist Jeannette Sorrell has quickly won international
attention as a leading voice in the new generation of early music
conductors. As founder and music director of Apollo's Fire - The
Cleveland Baroque Orchestra, she maintains a busy performance
schedule, and has made an impressive list of acclaimed recordings for
the Koch, Eclectra and Onda labels.
During the current season, in addition to the substantive series of
Apollo's Fire concerts in Cleveland, Sorrell will take the orchestra
on tour for performances in New York at Columbia University, in
Colorado at the prestigious Aspen Music Festival, in Kalamazoo and
Bloomfield Hills (Detroit) Michigan, and in Toledo for the Toledo
Symphony's Peristyle Series.
During the 2006/2007 season, in addition to Apollo's Fire
performances, Jeannette Sorrell has been engaged as a guest conductor
with the Akron Symphony in a program of Mozart, Schubert and
Beethoven, and with the Arizona Opera for a production of Zemire et
Azor (Beauty and the Beast) .
As a conductor, Sorrell studied at the Tanglewood Music Festival and
served as a conducting fellow at the Aspen Music Festival. Her
teachers include Roger Norrington and Leonard Bernstein at Tanglewood
and Robert Spano at Oberlin.
As a harpsichordist, she studied with Gustav Leonhardt, and took both
the First Prize and the Audience Choice Award in the 1991 Spivey
International Harpsichord Competition (competing against over 70
contestants from Europe, Japan, North America, and the Soviet Union.)
Upon receiving an Artist Diploma in harpsichord from Oberlin
Conservatory in 1990, she was immediately invited to join the faculty
of the Oberlin Baroque Performance Institute.
With Apollo's Fire - The Cleveland Baroque Orchestra, which she
founded in 1992, she tours throughout North America and has made
appearances at the Library of Congress, the Boston Early Music
Festival, the National Academy of Sciences, the Philadelphia Bach
Festival, the CBC Glenn Gould Studio in Toronto, the Gilmore
International Keyboard Festival in Michigan, the Ojai Festival in
California, and the New World Symphony’s Baroque
 Festival
in Florida. She has been featured on numerous national and
international broadcasts by National Public Radio, European Community
Radio, the BBC, and Canada’s CBC.
Ms Sorrell's CD recordings with Apollo’s Fire include Monteverdi's
Vespers, Noels and Carols, Bach's St. John Passion, the complete
Brandenburg concerti, Monteverdi's L'Orfeo (sung in English), a disc
of Vivaldi concertos, two discs of Mozart, and a disc of Telemann
concertos and suites on the Koch International Classics label.
Ms. Sorrell is the winner of the 1994 Erwin Bodky Award, given to the
outstanding young performer in early music; and the 2003 Cleveland
Arts Prize. Together with Apollo's Fire, she is the recipient of the
1995 Noah Greenberg Award from the American Musicological Society,
given for the outstanding scholarly and artistic project. In 2004 Ms.
Sorrell received an Honorary Doctorate from Case Western Reserve
University in Cleveland.
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