Harpsichordist Jory Vinikour takes a bow after a recital at the Valletta International Baroque Festival in Malta.
Vinikour appears in recitals across Europe and North America and regularly records solo albums, such as his latest release, Johann Sebastian Bach’s Partitas, BWV 825-830, on the Solo Luminus label. In addition to accompanying noted singers and instrumentalists like countertenor David Daniels and lutenist Jakob Lindberg, he has performed with orchestras ranging from the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra to Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, in some cases conducting from the keyboard. He serves as regular harpsichordist for the Haymarket Opera Company in Chicago and has taken part in more than 45 opera productions worldwide, sometimes doubling as head vocal coach and assistant conductor. In between, he manages to squeeze in time to serve as artistic director of the Chicago Bach Ensemble and Great Lakes Baroque, an early-music series in a suburb of Milwaukee.
Vinikour has received his share of honors, including two Grammy Award nominations. The first came in 2012 for his recording of the complete harpsichord works of Rameau. “I don’t think I slept for three days,” Vinikour said. “I couldn’t believe it.” The second came two years later, when he went in a very different direction, releasing an album titled Toccatas: Modern American Music for Harpsichord. It features works by Henry Cowell, Patricia Morehead, Ned Rorem, and Mel Powell, and shows that Vinikour is equally at home in contemporary repertoire.
Vinikour with countertenor David Daniels and bewigged friend.
The 53-year-old harpsichordist grew up in Mount Prospect, IL, a northwestern suburb of Chicago, and his family enrolled him in piano when he was 5 or 6. He quickly showed aptitude for the instrument, and by the time he was in high school, he was studying with Emilio V. del Rosario Jr., a respected teacher for more than 40 years at the Music Institute of Chicago.
Although he was fascinated with the harpsichord and Baroque music from his earliest days, Vinikour did not have an opportunity to really pursue those interests until he began piano studies in 1981 at Baltimore’s Peabody Conservatory, where he minored in harpsichord performance. “I went through the whole piano repertoire, but I always felt a real draw to this earlier period — Bach and before as opposed to Bach and after,” he said.
After two years, he switched to the Mannes College of Music (now Mannes School of Music) in New York, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in 1986 in piano performance and master’s degree in harpsichord in 1988. Following two years of post-graduate studies at Rutgers University with Charlotte Mattax, he won a Fulbright Scholarship for further exploration of the harpsichord abroad. He chose Paris, where he had been a 1987 prize winner at the Paris International Harpsichord Competition and met Huguette Dreyfus, a legendary French harpsichordist, who died in May 2016. When his scholarship ended, Vinikour decided to remain in France.
Vinikour rehearsing at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall.
Vinikour is also drawn to the diversity of sounds that can be produced by harpsichords, depending on their makers or national schools. He points out that an 18th-century German harpsichord by Johann Adolph Hass in the Yale Collection of Musical Instruments conjures a “very different sonic universe” than a French instrument on which one might perform the music of Rameau or François Couperin. He owns several harpsichords, the finest being a modern copy by Tony Chinnery of a 1769 French harpsichord in the Raymond Russell Collection of Early Keyboard Instruments at the University of Edinburgh. Others include an Italian-style instrument and a 1940s one made by the famed French company Pleyel.
In 2013, Vinikour moved back to his native Chicago, and he since has made that city his base of operations. “It felt like time to do something different,” he said. “My partner felt that with the Grammy nomination I had received that maybe it was time to try to develop something in the United States.” But he is no way giving up on France. He retains dual citizenship and returns to the country often. The two have kept a pied à terre in Chalon-sur-Saône, a town in the Burgundy region where Vinikour taught for six years at a national music school.
Vinikour with violinist Rachel Barton Pine.
On top of his performing, Vinikour also composes the embellishments several singers, including such heavy-hitters as Vivica Genaux, Rolando Villazón, and Anne Sofie von Otter, use when performing Baroque music. “I think we all profit greatly from Jory’s fun, exciting, spot-on variations, which seem to just flow out of him,” mezzo-soprano von Otter said via e-mail.
At the request of conductor Marc Minkowski, Vinikour first created such embellishments for a 1997 recording of Handel’s Ariodante featuring Les Musiciens du Louvre with von Otter and other major soloists, such as tenor Richard Croft. “I immediately took to Jory, who has a quick mind, a naughty sense of humor and is so musical,” said von Otter, who has gone on to record and perform with him in other contexts. For that opera and all the requests he has received since, Vinikour tries to create what he described as “stylistic, idiomatic and idiosyncratic” ornaments. “I’m thinking about what the singer I’m working with is capable of accomplishing, but I’m also trying to remain within the language of the composer,” he said.
Other projects include a recording of contemporary harpsichord concertos with the Chicago Philharmonic, set for release in 2018 — what he called a “kind of a dream project” — and an album of duetti da camera by Agostino Steffani, an Italian Baroque composer Vinikour believes should be better known. The latter will be recorded in mid-February in Sono Luminus’ Boyce, VA, studio. In addition to serving as harpsichordist, he is overseeing the choice of repertoire and his instrumental partners and soloists, which will include soprano Andréanne Brisson Paquin and countertenor José Lemos.