DAMARISCOTTA — Round Top Center for the Arts’ winter concert series will begin with “Both Your Voices Blended” by Roxana Gundry, voice and lute, and Ann Foskett, reading.
The program, of songs and reading from the plays of Shakespeare, will be at 2 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 12, in the lower gallery of the center’s main building. The center is on Business Route 1.
William Shakespeare’s plays are full of songs and references to music. Many of the songs are set to music of the period, and many ballads are alluded to in the plays. Gundry and Foskett have taken these songs and brought them to life in words and music.
The women have previously collaborated on both sides of the Atlantic, including their program on English ballads at the Knox mansion.
Gundry started her musical career as a singer, and then became interested in the lute and its music. She combines a fascination for medieval and Renaissance history with music, which has led to her being invited to give many master classes and seminars in universities, colleges and schools in the British Isles, North America, Australia and South Africa.
She has written several books, “With My Strings of Small Wire”; “To Drive the Cold Winter Away,” a book of Christmas traditions and music with accompanying CD; and “The English Ballad,” a book and CD. She recently made a solo recording for Dinmore Records on Queen Bess, a portrait in words and music of Queen Elizabeth I of England.
Foskett was born in England, but has lived in the U.S. for more than 40 years, the last 15 in Damariscotta Mills. She is a graduate of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, with a B.S. in communications/broadcasting. She tours in “Jezebel or Saint,” a presentation of the life of Puritan dissident Anne Hutchinson, and “Take Up the Song,” on the life and work of Edna St. Vincent Millay.
She has worked in theaters across the country and played leading roles at many major theater companies in New England. She has appeared as the Queen Mother in a TV miniseries, “The Kennedys of Massachusetts”; has had roles in the movies “School Ties,” “House Sitter,” “Home Before Dark” and “Message in a Bottle,” as well as appearances in commercials and print ads.
For more information about the Round Top program, people can call (207) 563-1507.
Tickets may be purchased at the door. Admission is $10 for members, $12 for nonmembers and free to students under 18. Group prices are available.
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