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Thomas Binkley was an American lutenist and musicologist who specialized in early music. Also a prolific and award-winning recording artist, he can be found on over 50 recordings. He was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1931 and had one older brother. His mother worked as a librarian for the University of Colorado and was also a skilled pianist. His father was a historian, author, and educator who taught at various universities including Stanford, Harvard, and Colombia. Binkley began playing music as a trombonist in his school band, and later as a teen he played in a local dance band. He also played folk music on the guitar with his brother. After he graduated high school, he moved to New York, and worked a series of unrelated jobs including hospital night guard, taxi driver, and bottle washer for a milk factory. He then joined the marines for a short time until he was honorably discharged because of an injury to his elbow, which would prove to be a blessing in disguise. His injury forced him to stop playing the trombone, but this led to a renewed interest in the guitar, and eventually his discovery of the lute. He began taking lute lessons with his childhood friend, Joseph Iadone, and decided to pursue music more seriously. At the age of 20 Binkley enrolled at the University of Illinois to study music under Dragan Plamenac and Claude Palisca and graduated with honors in 1954. He then attended one year of graduate school at the University of Munich, followed by a year back at the University of Illinois where he worked toward a doctorate, but he never finished either degree. By 1959, he'd moved back to Munich and started the ensemble Studio der Frühen Musik with Nigel Rogers, Sterling Jones, and Andrea von Ramm. This group gave Binkley an opportunity to develop as an arranger and as a lute accompanist. They kept an extensive touring schedule, made more than 40 recordings, and won several European awards. Their visits to North Africa exposed Binkley to instruments and performance practices that remained unchanged for hundreds of years. He borrowed these sounds and ideas and applied them to their recordings, creating a unique synthesis of textures and timbres. The ensemble eventually disbanded in 1976 because they couldn't agree on their musical direction. Binkley then moved to California, where he followed his dream of homesteading, and in 1978 he taught at Stanford University. In 1979, he created the Early Music Institute at Indiana University, where he served as the director until his retirement in 1995. ~ RJ Lambert

Tenor Nigel Rogers led a highly colorful and varied music career, primarily singing in concerts and recitals, serving as a professor of music at the Royal College of Music, founding the choral ensemble Chiaroscuro and (as a late-comer) taking up conducting. Moreover, the early years of his career were spent in Germany, and his operatic debut came only in 1969. For all his multifaceted talents, though, he was above all a great singer.

Rogers was born in Wellington, Shropshire, England, on March 21, 1935. From 1953 to 1956, he studied music at Cambridge University (King's College), becoming a choral scholar. He had further studies privately at Rome and Milan, and from 1959 to 1961, he was enrolled at the Hochschule für Musik in Munich, where his most important teacher was Gerhard Hüsch. From 1960 until 1964, Rogers sang in the early music Munich-based vocal quartet Studio der frühen Musik. Rogers returned to England in 1965, where he began his recording career, and four years later made his operatic debut in Amsterdam. He returned to Amsterdam on several subsequent occasions, including for his 1972 appearance as Poppea in Monteverdi's The Coronation of Poppea, under Gustav Leonhardt.

Rogers served as professor of voice at London's Royal College of Music from 1978. The following year, he founded Chiaroscuro, a vocal ensemble devoted to early Italian music. In 1985, at age 50, Rogers made his conducting debut. He would go on to direct and perform in many choral works, such as Alessandro Scarlatti's La gloria di primavera (1996). Rogers was still active in his seventies: at his 70th birthday concert in Wigmore Hall (May 3, 2005), he performed a range of solo works by Carissimi, Stradella, and others, with Elizabeth Kenny on theorbo and his wife, Lina Zilinskyte, on harpsichord.

Even his admirers will tell that while he possessed an attractive voice, it was not as creamy or warm as many other tenor voices, but Rogers wielded his instrument with all the dramatic and technical skills one could ever expect. Rogers was highly regarded in early music and Baroque repertory, with notable performances of works by Machaut, Dowland, Purcell, and many others. However, his repertory extended well beyond the Baroque period to take in music by Schubert, Verdi, and Britten. Rogers made about 70 recordings during his career, spread over a range of labels, including Archiv, EMI, and Teldec. Rogers passed away on January 19, 2022. ~ Robert Cummings