Geneviève Gilardeau

Violin

Geneviève Gilardeau has been a core member of Tafelmusik since 1999. She has been featured as a soloist several times with the group, in recordings of concertos by Vivaldi and Leclair, and in concert playing concertos by Bach and Telemann. She was introduced to baroque performance practice by the violinist and conductor Jean-François Rivest, at the Conservatoire de Musique du Québec à Chicoutimi and at the Université de Montréal, where she obtained her Master’s degree. A core member of Les Violons du Roy from 1995 to 1998, she commuted during those years from Quebec City to Toronto in order to study baroque violin with Jeanne Lamon at the Glenn Gould School of the Royal Conservatory. Geneviève also performs with several groups in Toronto (Aradia, Toronto Consort, Classical Consort) and in Montreal (Masques, Les voix humaines). With her husband, lutenist Lucas Harris, she released the CD The Bach-Weiss Sonata. She is the proud mother of 11-year-old Daphnée Gilardeau Harris.

Cristina Zacharias

Violin

Canadian violinist Cristina Zacharias has been a core member of Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra since 2004. Frequently featured in solo and chamber music repertoire, she has performed across North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Cristina also appears annually at the Carmel Bach Festival,  and can be heard on over 25 recordings for the ATMA, Analekta, CBC, BIS, Naxos, and Tafelmusik Media labels. As an educator, Cristina is active in Tafelmusik’s training institutes as well as at the University of Toronto.

Equally passionate about baroque, classical, and modern repertoire, Cristina is a frequent collaborator, guest soloist, and director with a diverse group of ensembles, including the Toronto Bach Festival, Theatre of Early Music, Manitoba Chamber Orchestra, Brandon Chamber Players, and Pacific Baroque Orchestra. Cristina holds a MMus degree from McGill University.

Michael Unterman

Violoncello

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 Assistant to the Artistic Directors, Librarian, and Program Editor, and oversees Tafelmusik’s Artist Training programs, notably as Artistic Coordinator of the Tafelmusik Baroque Summer Institute. A native of southwestern Ontario, Charlotte holds Bachelor and Master 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.spaces for music and musicians.