Robert Cole returns to Berkeley Festival & Exhibition
Jesse Hamlin
Published 2:00 pm, Wednesday, February 19, 2014
Robert Cole: Early-music maven, formerly of Cal Performances, goes back to Berkeley festival he founded.
Robert Cole was into early classical music way before period instruments and Baroque ensembles began cropping up at American conservatories and colleges in the 1990s. The distinguished impresario spent two years in graduate school at the University of Southern California in the late ’50s studying “In Nomine,” the 16th century English small-ensemble music that Cole planned to write his dissertation about until he blew off academia to pursue conducting.
“I loved English madrigals and that whole period. It was pretty mysterious at the time,” says Cole, whose conducting career eventually took a backseat to his primary work as one of the country’s most respected and creative arts presenters…
Read the entire post at sfchronicle.com
