Jeannette Sorrell

Jeannette Sorrell is an American conductor and harpsichordist and the founder and musical director of Apollo's Fire, the Cleveland Baroque Orchestra.

Jeannette Sorrell was born in San Francisco in 1965. Her parents, a Swiss drama critic/linguist father and an American mother, were both graduate students when she was born, and both later became university professors. She grew up studying piano, violin, ballet and theatre. In an interview with the Cleveland Plain Dealer, she describes how she spent her first year of piano lessons (at the age of 9) practicing on a paper keyboard that she made, because the family had no piano. Her family moved to the Shenandoah Valley area of Virginia when she was 14. She took her first paid job at the age of 15, playing the piano for a Southern Baptist church. This is where she first encountered early American folk music and shape-note hymns which later developed into an artistic interest for her. At 16 she began studying conducting and composition, and founded an instrumental and vocal ensemble for which she arranged all of the music.

Sorrell received a full scholarship to the Artist Diploma program of Oberlin Conservatory, where she studied harpsichord with Lisa Crawford and orchestral conducting with Robert Spano. In 1989 she became one of the youngest students in the conducting program at the Tanglewood Festival, where she studied under Leonard Bernstein and Sir Roger Norrington. Upon graduating from Oberlin in 1990, she was immediately invited to join the faculty of Oberlin's summer baroque institute as chamber music coach and continuo accompanist. That summer she also served as a conducting fellow at the Aspen Music Festival.

She then moved to Amsterdam to study harpsichord with Gustav Leonhardt in Amsterdam. Following this year of intensive study with Leonhardt, she won First Prize and the Audience Choice Award in the 1991 Spivey International Harpsichord Competition held in Atlanta, GA, competing in a field of 70 contestants from Europe, the former Soviet Union, Israel and the U.S.

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