Patricia Ahern

Violin

Born in Paris and raised in Minnesota, Patricia Ahern was educated at Northwestern University, Indiana University, and the Schola Cantorum in Basel, Switzerland. She has concertized throughout Canada, the US, Europe, Asia, Australia, and South America, and has performed with Milwaukee Baroque, Ars Antigua, Chicago Opera Theater, Toronto Consort, Aradia, I Furiosi, Newberry Consort, Musica Pacifica, Toronto Bach Festival, and the Carmel Bach Festival. She taught baroque violin at the Freiburg Conservatory in Germany and Oberlin’s Baroque Performance Institute, as well as the Banff Evolution Quartet Program. She has given masterclasses at McGill, Western University, University of Toronto, Yale, Harvard, Cornell, California State University Long Beach, Sookmyung Women’s University (Seoul), and the Sydney Conservatorium (Australia). Patricia has played in Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra since 2002 and is a member of the Eybler String Quartet.

Marco Cera

Oboe

Oboist Marco Cera studied at the Padua Conservatory of Music (Italy) and at the Musikhochschule der Stadt Basel (Switzerland). In 1996 he was chosen as first oboe for the European Union Baroque Orchestra, with which he performed in Denmark, Portugal, Germany, United Kingdom and South Africa. He regularly collaborates as a soloist with the leading baroque orchestras in Italy and Europe, including Il Giardino Armonico, Concerto Italiano, I Sonatori della Gioiosa Marca, Accademia Bizantina, Cappella della Pieta’ de’ Turchini, Ensemble Zefiro, Europa Galante, I Barocchisti, Les Talens Lyriques, and Academia Montis Regalis, and has worked with conductors Jordi Savall, Gustav Leonhardt, Robert King, Jesper Christensen, Jaap ter Linden, and Barthold Kuijken. His wide discography includes works for Teldec, Opus 111, Chandos, Dynamic, Tactus. Marco moved from Italy to Toronto to play with Tafelmusik from 2000–2002, and rejoined the orchestra in January 2007.

The pandemic inspired Marco to create a YouTube channel where he shares videos of unusual repertoire on the baroque oboe: arranging, video recording, and editing everything by himself. For Tafelmusik Marco created two multimedia shows:  The Harlequin Salon in 2018, and Music & Magic in fall 2021.

Michael Unterman

Cello

Michael Unterman, a cellist born and raised in Vancouver, BC, is a recent addition to Tafelmusik’s roster, joining the orchestra in January of 2023. Having spent the better part of 20 years studying and working in the Northeast US, he is overjoyed to be back north of the border and playing with this phenomenal ensemble! Michael is also a core member of the string chamber orchestra A Far Cry and serves as principal cellist of Boston Baroque, earning Grammy nominations with both groups in 2019. Of late he has performed and recorded with ensembles including Arion Baroque Orchestra, the Cramer Quartet, Ensemble Caprice, the Knights, Ruckus, and the Thirteen, and has enjoyed past stints as a member of the Portland Baroque Orchestra and as Artistic Director of Five Boroughs Music Festival, where he worked to present chamber music in venues across New York City. Behind-the-scenes work has been an important part of Michael’s musical life, having undertaken roles in fundraising, artistic planning, and curation for 5BMF and A Far Cry, and leading to programs that have been praised as “just the kind of imaginative artistic agenda that more groups should be prodded to try” (The Boston Globe), and “gorgeous and remarkably unified” (Washington Post).

Michael studied at the New England Conservatory and The Juilliard School with Laurence Lesser, Natasha Brofsky, and Phoebe Carrai, and was a Fulbright Scholar to Barcelona, Spain, where he studied with Lluis Claret and Quartetto Casals. His early mentors and musical role models include his longtime cello teacher Judy Fraser, his quartet coach violinist Heilwig von Koenigslow, his mother and pianist-collaborator Kathy Bjorseth, and Tom and Isobel Rolston, the former directors of the Banff Centre, all of whom instilled an enduring drive to bring about and preserve nurturing spaces for music and musicians.

Charlotte Nediger

Harpsichord

As a performer, Charlotte Nediger’s first love is playing continuo in an orchestral and/or choral setting, something she’s been delighted to do with Tafelmusik since joining the orchestra in 1980 at age 21. She also works being the scenes as Librarian, Program Editor, Artistic Operations Assistant, and Artistic Coordinator of the Tafelmusik Baroque Summer Institute. A native of southwestern Ontario, Charlotte holds Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Western University in London and a Solo Diploma from the Royal Conservatory of The Hague in the Netherlands. She teaches at the University of Toronto.

Charlotte’s grateful to her father for deciding on a whim to build a harpsichord for his pianist daughter when she was 14 years old. His woodworking project forever changed the trajectory of her life, sending her down a path that led to Tafelmusik. She’s also grateful to her mother, ever a lover of the piano, who cheered her on even while asking, “Dear, does anyone actually like listening to the harpsichord?”