ACRONYM Will Perform as Part of the Shriver Hall Concert Series

 Shriver Hall Concert Series will welcome the Baroque band ACRONYM to Shriver Hall in its Baltimore Debut on Sunday, December 8, 2024 at 5:30 pm. ACRONYM’s 11 members perform on strings, violas da gamba, theorbo, and keyboards.

For this anticipated performance, ACRONYM presents a selection of music from 17th-century Vienna, a city in thrall to stylus fantasticus, a genre combining Italian drama and Northern European formal complexity. Featured composers include Giovanni Valentini, Antonio Bertali, Georg Piscator, Adam Drese, Johann Heinrich Schmelzer, Marc'Antonio Ziani, Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber, and Alessandro Poglietti.

"It's a thrill to bring our band ACRONYM to my hometown of Baltimore, and we are so honored to make our debut with Shriver Hall,” shares group member Loren Ludwig. “Our music is weird, wonderful, and mostly unknown—or unjustly forgotten. And I don’t use “band” lightly; we really do groove and jam in all the ways we imagine musicians were doing 350 years ago. I hope the Baltimore audience will enjoy our playful, virtuosic, seventeenth-century stylus fantasticus.”

Since its creation in 2012, ACRONYM has released 10 critically acclaimed albums. The band’s most recent album, Cantica Obsoleta, features the works from Sweden’s Düben Collection, which The Boston Globe described as a “musical time capsule” that “ offers enough resplendence to transport anyone.” Other recent projects include the first modern performances and recordings of works by Biber, Rosenmüller, and Capricornus.

Preceding ACRONYM’s appearance, Shriver Hall Concert Series presents the Escher String Quartet and violist Jordan Bak on Sunday, October 27, 2024 at 5:30 pm. Following ACRONYM’s concert are cellist Pablo Ferrández, who makes his Baltimore Recital Debut, and pianist Julio Elizalde on Sunday, January 19, 2025 at 5:30 pm.