October 11, 2025
An interview with David Hatcher and Kenneth Bé
~ John Thiessen, Executive Director
During the month of October, the Nautilus Renaissance Viol Consort will perform three New York-area concerts. The first, provocatively entitled The Italian Job, features 4-part Renaissance music for recorders, viols, and lute, while the second and third, Venice: Circa 1500, explore the beginnings of printed polyphonic music. Manhattanites will be happy to hear that the final concert will be performed at Advent Lutheran Church, Broadway and West 93rd Street on Sunday, October 19th at 7 pm. Others interested in attending may be enticed by the Rockland County performances in Piermont and Palisades.
Nautilus is a new venture by longtime GEMS friend, supporter and viola da gambist Kenneth Bé, GEMS’ Board Member LuGene Bé, and viola da gambist/bassist Motomi Igarashi. The ensemble’s mission is “to create and increase awareness of the Renaissance viol”, an instrument which has received less exposure than the later Baroque version.
In addition to performing concerts, Nautilus presents workshops, including two offered this month: the first for Renaissance viol consort with matched meantone tuned recorders by maker Tom Prescott, and a second for the Viola da Gamba Society of Greater New York on October 19th at Stern College, focusing on playing early viol music on later 17th-century instruments.
Joining the Nautilus Renaissance Viol Consort for these upcoming concerts and workshops will be the English viola da gamba virtuoso and clinician David Hatcher (pictured above). He leads the UK ensemble the Linarol Consort which takes its name from the Venetian instrument maker Francesco Linarol (1515/20‒1601) whose sole surviving Renaissance viol, currently on display at Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, serves as the model for replicas on which David’s ensemble plays.
Linarol viols
David has worked with modern viola da gamba maker Richard Jones extensively on these and other Linarol copies, of which there are now well over a hundred. Kenneth’s tenor is #104 (an exact replica of the original in Vienna), and LuGene’s new treble, #111, were made from the same sycamore tree in Scotland. (Pictured at right)
GEMS sat down with both Kenneth Bé and David Hatcher to discuss their respective ensembles and forthcoming New York collaborations.
John Thiessen: Thank you both for opening our ears, eyes and hearts to this wonderful but relatively underappreciated repertoire for the Renaissance viol! Beginning with you, Kenneth, what drew you to this instrument and how does it differ from the 17th-century Baroque version, more familiar to early music audiences?
Kenneth Bé: My first up-close encounter with viols was in the Collegium Musicum at Yale University as an undergraduate in the late 70’s. My interest in viol consort repertoire, especially from the 16th century, was always high because of my chief interest in the lute. You can’t understand how lute repertoire works without knowing about viol consort music as background. But as I eventually started playing the viol myself, I felt drawn quickly to the light and agile sound of the Renaissance viol when it is played together with other such viols. The sound is lighter and reedier vs. the louder, more velvety sound of Baroque viols. The Renaissance viol helps bring out more clarity in the performances of polyphony.
John Thiessen: David, I understand that your early music “aha” moment came in a listening booth of a record store in England, listening to Handel harpsichord works played by Janos Sebastyn.
David Hatcher: Yes! It was that memorable record shop experience in Falmouth — I still own the LP and a digital version — that made me more and more interested in early music, although I had no connection with it directly.
John Thiessen: As musicians, we have singular experiences where we are completely astounded by a new sound or way of playing, and it changes our lives forever. In my own case, it was the 300-year Handel and Bach birth anniversary LPs from England with Michael Laird and Crispian Steele-Perkins playing the Baroque trumpet. Suffice to say, the scales dropped from my eyes. Two years later, I was in London studying with both. David, tell us about your early music mentors and how you arrived at the Renaissance viol?
David Hatcher: My brother and I were to be the first in our family to go to university. Dad was entirely self-educated and ended up being very well read. He was an obsessive jazz fan and I think I knew most of the jazz greats before I came out of my mother’s womb. Luckily, my maths teacher at high school during my last two years there was a flautist and recognized in me a nascent talent. He used to give me flute and recorder lessons during his free lunch times at school and that really got me going. After a year I decided to change course, from aiming for medical college, to music college. In those days, admissions were much more flexible than now, so when I turned up at Trinity College of Music (my first visit to London), being able to play the audition pieces easily but with absolutely no wider knowledge of music theory, they gave me a deferred place and sent me on a music foundation course. Once in college (as a modern flute player), I soon switched to join the early music department, with the newly appointed and brilliant, charismatic head of department, recorder and viol player Philip Thorby. He saw that I was interested in playing the viol and so arranged for Charles Medlam (London Baroque) to come in to teach me from my second year (of four). I was the only viol student at Trinity College of Music, and there was one other at one of the other London colleges. We were a rare breed.
I was always more drawn to Renaissance music than Baroque, but there were so few students at college who wanted to play music from that period that I concentrated on the later viol and recorder repertoire whilst there. It has been a joy to be able to delve deeply into early 16th-century viol repertoire having now built up a collection of appropriate instruments. My own instrument, that I have played since graduating, is a Barak Norman, built in London in 1731. As such it is inappropriate for Renaissance music, although wonderful for later repertoire. After visiting Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum in 2007 and having the thrill of being allowed to take the original Linarol viol out of its display case to personally handle for a whole day, I commissioned Richard Jones in Scotland to begin making my set. Since then, he and I have worked closely together, exploring the possibilities of this fascinating instrument. He is a wonderfully talented and experienced maker with an open and enquiring mind, so when I ask for such-and-such a sound (that I can hear in my mind’s ear) he works wonders to produce it without compromising the integrity of the instrument. He has devoted his entire instrument making career to Linarol’s instrument and has now made something in the region of 110 instruments, an increasing number of which have drifted westward to the States.
John Thiessen: Kenneth, you are a conservator by profession, working on Old Master paintings for the New York Historical Society. Otherwise, you seem to be in the audience for every single early music event in the city! Apropos of which, in the case of the Francesco Linarol tenor viol you play, I understand there is a visual connection with the Metropolitan Museum.
Kenneth Bé: There is a Titian painting at the Met Museum, Venus and the Lute Player. The instrument in the lower right corner of the painting very clearly resembles a Linarol tenor in many details of the form and construction of the back of the instrument and its shoulders and neck join area. Studying iconography and depictions in artwork is a huge field of study, but suffice it to say, we often find great examples of instrument depictions and valuable information about performance practice throughout the world’s museum collections and auction houses!
John Thiessen: I love the title of the first program, The Italian Job. It made me laugh with obvious reference to the hilarious 1969 and 2003 movies of the same name. Will your concert also end on a cliffhanger? And otherwise, to what should your audience pay attention?
David Hatcher: We don’t expect any cliffhangers. No unresolved chords! I think the audience will find the music wonderfully approachable and truly enjoyable. The Italian Job ends up being a bit of an inside joke. One of my projects simply had a file with that name.
John Thiessen: The Venice: Circa 1500 performances also have an extra-musical aspect, though in this case a real one, with a focus on the emergence of printed polyphonic music. You have chosen music from Ottaviano Petrucci’s Harmonice Musices Odhecaton for these concerts. Take us back to 1500 and Venice as a vital center for printing. Did the new possibilities for wider public ownership of contemporary musical works influence performances there and elsewhere?
Kenneth Bé: Certainly, people of the middle and upper classes were able to purchase music and viols. Having copies of repertoire readily available because of the printing press allowed for more performances, especially in the Scuole, intellectual societies, of which the Scuola Grande survives.
David Hatcher: Owning viols was an expensive hobby depending on the instruments, like today. There were homes with large libraries, often with large sections for music. They were interested in buying the “latest thing” and so large numbers of published music became an important part of these collections. The print runs during this period were between 250 and 500 copies.
John Thiessen: Fascinating. Our thanks to you both for discussing your passion for the Renaissance viol. GEMS wishes you well with your imminent October projects. Kenneth, you are a valued member of New York’s early music community. Besides everything you give to GEMS, thank you for your scholarship, your music-making and your generosity. David, I hope you will give New York a prominent place in your annual calendar, so that early music audiences can have many more opportunities to enjoy your playing and teaching.