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Upcoming Performances

Saturday, May 24th at 4:00 p.m. at First Congregational Church of Hatfield

‘Old American Songs and French Impressions’: music of Aaron Copland, Rebecca Clarke, Maurice Ravel, and Claude Debussy for viola and piano

Geoffrey Baker Archambeau, viola

Corbin Beisner, piano

Friday, May 30th at 7:00 p.m.: Wesley United Methodist Church of Hadley

Sunday, June 1st at 7:00 p.m.: Northampton Center for the Arts at 33 Hawley

with Amherst Ballet Theatre Company

‘Working to Transcend’: Sonata for viola and piano by Rebecca Clarke and Quintet for piano and strings in a minor by Florence Price

Choreography by Mikayla Archambeau and Madeleine Bonn

Robyn Quinnett and Hillary Dumond, violins

Geoffrey Baker Archambeau, viola

Ignacy Gaydamovich, cello

Corbin Beisner, piano

Artistic director of Conway Fine Arts, an organization dedicated to creating opportunity for professional artists and reaching new audiences, violist and conductor Geoffrey Baker Archambeau performs regularly on independent chamber music series and with fine ensembles.

2023 performances concluded in December with a full house at Hawks and Reed Performing Arts Center in Greenfield, featuring ‘Ballet and Bach,’ Mikayla Reine Archambeau’s original choreography of J.S. Bach’s Cello Suites No. 3 and 5 which Geoffrey performed. In August, Geoffrey joined cellist Douglas McNames and violinist Sarah Briggs for ‘Beethoven Invades Conway,’ the first concert in recorded history at beautiful St. Mark’s Church in Conway, dating to 1877. In June, Geoffrey produced and directed the ‘WxNW-New England Festival’ in Ashfield, Goshen, and Greenfield, with different performances of string quartets by Amy Beach, Florence Price, Béla Bártok, and Franz Joseph Haydn, interwoven with narrative by Zitkala Sa, Langston Hughes, Luminita Cioba, and Gerald Vizenour, dramatically narrated by actor Laura Zawarski. Mikayla Reine Archambeau led a dance and movement workshop for children, and Alexandre Pazmandy hosted a wine tasting, with vintages from France, Austria, and the United States. In April, Geoffrey and keyboardist Pamela Gilmore inaugurated Conway’s new congregational church, built to replace the town’s iconic landmark destroyed by a tornado in 2017, with ‘Fantasias and Sonatas,’ a concert of works by J.S. Bach and G.P. Telemann.

2022 performances included Geoffrey conducting the Monteux Festival Orchestra in Maine, the innovative Heirloom Music Festival at multiple venues in Franklin County in western Massachusetts, a Ukraine benefit concert featuring Shostakovich’s Quartet No. 8 in c minor performed shortly after the invasion at Gateway City Arts in Holyoke, Massachusetts, and leading the Opus Amadeus ensemble in arias from Handel’s Messiah and baroque concerti at Holy Family church in Deerfield. Concerts during the recent pandemic and earlier included an outdoor series of great string quartets by fine musicians of the San Francisco Bay area with ‘Concerts in the Park’ in Piedmont, California, an appearance with the Gabriel Ensemble near Pottsville, Pennsylvania, the ‘Mozart at Monteux’ festival in Maine, and ‘Concerts on the Square’ at the Ethical Society on Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia, a series which Geoffrey designed and produced, collaborating with cellist Douglas McNames, a frequent guest of the Philadelphia Orchestra, grand prize winner of the Fischoff competition, and noted period musician.

Geoffrey earned degrees at the Peabody Conservatory and the Yale School of Music and also attended Northern Illinois University and the Eastman School where he studied with Jesse Levine, Joseph de Pasquale, Richard Young, and the Tokyo and Vermeer string quartets. In France, he performed in masterclasses given by violinist Gérard Poulet and violist Tasso Adamopoulos.

During his freelancing career in greater Philadelphia, Geoffrey performed for many seasons as a violist with the Reading, Delaware, Allentown, and Riverside symphonies, in concerts with leading soloists and artists. He was an invited guest for the Graz Oper festival in Austria in 2006, collaborating with principal musicians from the Baltimore and New Jersey symphonies.

After moving to Northampton, Massachusetts, from California at the beginning of 2021, Geoffrey is now based nearby in Conway.