Harris, Lucas

Lucas Harris

Lucas Harris leads a busy freelancer’s life as a lutenist, conductor, continuo player, teacher, lecturer, coach, and researcher. His collection of nearly twenty plucked-string instruments includes various Renaissance & Baroque lutes/guitars as well as a theorbo, cittern, bandora, an 1831 Guadagnini guitar, and a 7-string electric guitar with a Floyd-Rose tremolo bar! Lucas studied early music at the Civica scuola di musica di Milano and

at the Hochschule für Künste Bremen before beginning his freelancing career in New York City. For the past two decades he bases his activities in Toronto, where he serves as the regular lutenist for Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra. He is a founding member of the Vesuvius Ensemble (dedicated to Southern Italian popular music) as well as the Lute Legends Collective (an association of plucked-string specialists from various cultures).

Lucas has worked in recent years with the Helicon Foundation, the Smithsonian Chamber Players, Les Délices, and Jordi Savall / Le Concert des Nations, and Early Music Vancouver. He serves on faculty at the Tafelmusik Summer Baroque Institute, Oberlin Conservatory’s Baroque Performance Institute, and the Canadian Renaissance Music Summer School. Also a choral conductor, Lucas has been the Artistic Director of the Toronto Chamber Choir since 2014 and has developed and conducted nearly thirty themed concert programs for the TCC. He has also been a guest director for the Pacific Baroque Orchestra, the Ohio State University Opera Program, Les voix baroques, Atalante, and the Toronto Consort. Lucas’s longstanding interest in women composers has resulted in many projects including the reconstruction of a motet collection by Chiara Margarita Cozzolani. www.lucasharris.ca