Live! At the Museum with Duo Tinkerhess

Duo Tinkerhess performs music from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries on the viola da gamba and triple harp, as well as on the cello and pedal harp. The engaged couple met at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles where they are both currently students. Using period instruments with gut strings, the duo performs works by well-known and lesser-known composers, sparking the interest of amateurs and connoisseurs alike. Their first album of gallant music for cello and pedal harp is currently being edited and will be released in December, 2023.

Eric Tinkerhess is a cellist, viola da gambist, composer and musicologist from Ann Arbor, Michigan. He has a B.A. in cello performance from the Oberlin Conservatory, an M.A. from the Paris Conservatory where he studied the viola da gamba with Christophe Coin, and a Master of Interpretation of Early Music—Research and Practice from the Sorbonne. His recordings with Audax Records have received numerous awards from the international press (“Diapason d’or” from Diapason Magazine, “top ten classical releases of 2019” from The Guardian for The Paris Album with Ensemble Diderot). As a teacher he has given master classes at Huddersfield University (UK) and the Shanghai Conservatory. His compositions have been performed at the Chautauqua Music Festival in New York, the Music Academy of the West in California, and at the Salle Cortot in Paris. He is currently a PhD student of musicology at the University of Southern California, writing his dissertation on Marin Marais’s character pieces. He is a music history instructor at the Colburn School in Los Angeles, and this fall he will join the faculty of Pepperdine University as a music history professor. He plays on two antique instruments: a cello by Giovanni Grancino, made in Milan in 1695, and a viola da gamba by Ambroise de Comble, made in Tournai in 1750.

Mana Azimi is a versatile harpist, specializing in modern pedal harp as well as triple harp and the medieval harp. She was born in Tehran and moved to Arizona at the age of twelve. After studying piano with her mom as a child, she eventually specialized in the pedal harp, obtaining a bachelor of music from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne, and a master’s from the University of Southern California. She is currently pursuing a graduate certificate at USC, studying the baroque triple harp with Maxine Eilander. She won the American Harp Society Foundation's 21st Anne Adams Award, and has recorded many original arrangements of songs for voice and harp, found on her YouTube channel.