Les Voix Humaines with Tyler Hawkins
January 24, 2026 @ 7:30 pm
Les Voix Humaines are back in the NWT to grace our ears once again with this special Yellowknife performance, as founding member and most incredible gambist Susie Napper takes flight with the Russian harpsichordist Elizaveta Miller. Also featuring local baroque lutenist Tyler Hawkins, their collective programme ‘Adversaries in Love’ transports us to the connected worlds and unmatched genius of Gauthier, Marais, Abel, Bach(s) and Weiss, all played on authentic period instruments.
The viol duo, Les Voix Humaines, brings flair and brilliance to their performances! Susie Napper and Mélisande Corriveau have performed together as members of Les Voix Humaines Consort for two decades and collaborated on many projects. They have performed across Canada, in the USA, France and Belgium as a duo. They both play on historic viols by London luthier, Barak Norman.
The duo builds on decades of performances worldwide by Susie Napper and Margaret Little who’s musical complicity was compared to the skill of a pair of trapeze artists or the telepathic communion of jazz artists. Their many prizes and recordings are the foundation on which the new duo has built a creative repertoire and innovative style to inspire a new generation of music-lovers.
Anguille sous roche – Something Fishy, the duo’s latest recording and video features delicacies from the French repertoire offering humour, virtuosity and tenderness in a unique, creative programme. Last November they recorded a new CD of several iconic works by J.S. Bach arranged by Susie Napper for two viols.
The duo has been joined by many celebrated soloists including singers Suzie Leblanc, Daniel Taylor, Charles Daniels and Jonathon Adams and instrumentalists, Wieland and Bart Kuijken, Davide Monti and Nigel North. Susie Napper has the honour of performing with Russian harpsichordist Elizaveta Miller for this special performance in Yellowknife.
Recent recipient of the honour of Companion of Arts and Letters of Quebec, cellist, gambist and continuo player par excellence, Susie Napper is alternatively praised or admonished for her colourful and controversial performances of solo and chamber repertoire of the baroque!
A rebel to the core, from an artistic milieu in London, in her teens she played début performances of Ligetti and Stockhausen as well as performance-art productions in alternative venues. By contrast she studied at Juilliard in New York at the height of the Vietnam resistance and at the Paris Conservatoire at the end of the student riots of ‘68.
San Francisco followed, where, having had an epiphany on receiving a bass viol, she threw herself headlong into new-wave, HIP baroque music-making, teaching herself the viol by playing, reading treatises and creating new styles of performance inspired by old!
As well as co-foundiing Philharmonia Baroque with her partner and inspiration, baroque oboist and writer, the late Bruce Haynes, they spent decades parenting delightful kids and musicing in Montreal where she created the Montreal Baroque Festival, a vehicle to unite the multitalented, Montreal early music community.
She has spent decades with a foot on either side of the Atlantic recording, performing, teaching in Montreal and Copenhagen and touring around Europe, the Far East and Oceania often with the viol duo, Les Voix humaines. Amongst dozens of recordings, the complete Concerts a deux violes esgales by Sieur de Ste Colombe is a highlight and her arrangements of music stolen from the wider baroque repertoire amuse both musicians and audiences alike!
Either praised or criticized for her use of rubato, general freedom of expression, variety of bow strokes and undying preference for harmony over melody, she is constantly searching for rhetorical meaning and eloquence to bring the printed page to life!
Elizaveta Miller is a versatile historical keyboardist whose artistry spans harpsichord, fortepiano, clavichord, organ, and modern piano. Her repertoire encompasses five centuries of music, with a particular focus on reviving underrepresented works, curating imaginative programs, and commissioning new compositions for historical instruments. She studied at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory, Moskva and the Yale School of Music.
Winner of the First Prize at the 2013 Musica Antiqua Competition in Bruges, Miller has since performed widely across North America and Europe at festivals such as the Montreal Baroque Festival, Montreal Bach Festival, Festival Classica, MA Festival Bruges, Beethovenfest Bonn, Bozar Music, the Dubrovnik Summer Festival, and The Homecoming Festival. As a continuo player, she has collaborated with leading conductors including Václav Luks, Reinhard Goebel, Maxim Emelyanychev, Robert Hollingworth, and Christian Curnyn.
After nearly a decade on the faculty of the Moscow State Conservatory, she resigned in March 2022 in protest of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. She was subsequently appointed Assistant Professor of Harpsichord and Coordinator of the Early Music Area at McGill University’s Schulich School of Music.
In 2024, she co-founded the ensemble Les Temps Perdus with cellist Jessica Korotkin, continuing her commitment to reimagining early music through performance and scholarship, and to mentoring emerging artists at the outset of their careers.
Joined by Yellowknife’s own Tyler Hawkins, recognized for his versatile guitarist work, levels up with this rare performance on his Baroque Lute featuring the music of Weiss, Bach and Gauthier. He received a BFA Honours in Performance on multi-string classical guitars (1990) and later released both online and CD versions of Tyler Hawkins – Bach on Seventeen Strings (2007) and Georg Philipp Telemann Lute Duets for Classical Guitar – Tyler Hawkins & Christopher Irvine (2009).
As director of the NWT International Lute Festival (2007 – 2017) he became immersed into the fascinating and very real world of early music, having commissioned a period accurate replica 13 course Sebastian Schelle baroque lute, hand made by the luthier duo Barber & Harris in London England, 2011. For this life-long guitarist the migration to lute has been an ultimate game changer giving way to an exciting new trajectory.
