Baroque string ensemble ACRONYM is dedicated to giving modern premieres of the wild instrumental music of the seventeenth century. The group formed in 2012 to create the first recording of the “Alphabet Sonatas” of Johann Pezel. ACRONYM’s following disc, sonatas by Antonio Bertali, was released in 2014 to critical acclaim; Alex Ross selected it as a CD Pick, and Early Music America Magazine wrote “the idiomatic performances and spacious recording by these young musicians are absolutely first rate. This is a disc … belonging in everyone’s collection.” In 2015 ACRONYM released a third album—the first recordings of Giovanni Valentini’s instrumental works — which was praised in Gramophone for being “played with expertise, enthusiasm, and an almost tactile sense of timbre.” 2016 saw the release of a fourth album: Wunderkammer, and a first recording of Valentini’s 1616 book of madrigals in collaboration with the vocal ensemble Les Canards Chantants.
Recent and upcoming engagements for ACRONYM include Music Before 1800 (NYC), Academy of Early Music (Ann Arbor), Miami Bach Society’s Tropical Baroque Festival, Mawahie Performing Arts Center’s Close Encounters (Great Barrington, MA), Electric Earth Concerts (Peterborough, NH), Five Boroughs Music Festival (NYC), Midtown Concerts (NYC), Holy Trinity Lutheran (NYC) and the Glencairn Museum (Bryn Athyn, PA).
The musicians of ACRONYM can also be heard in Apollo’s Fire, Tafelmusik, Handel and Haydn Society, International Contemporary Ensemble and Chicago Lyric Opera.
