Jeannette Sorrell is an American musician and the founder and musical director of Apollo's Fire, the Cleveland baroque orchestra.
She studied at the Tanglewood Music Festival under Roger Norrington and Leonard Bernstein, and served as a conducting fellow at the Aspen Music Festival. As a harpsichordist, she studied with Gustav Leonhardt in Amsterdam, and took First Prize and the Audience Choice Award in the 1991 Spivey International Harpsichord Competition. In 1992, she was a finalist for the Assistant Conductor post with the Cleveland Orchestra, which led to the founding of Apollo’s Fire; since then she has enjoyed a busy career touring and recording with this ensemble.
Sorrell’s guest engagements throughout North America include Boston’s Handel & Haydn Society (guest conductor and soloist), the Opera Theatre of St. Louis with the St. Louis Symphony, the Akron Symphony, Arizona Opera, and the Colorado Music Festival in Boulder, Colorado. As a keyboard artist she has performed throughout North America, France and Italy, including engagements with the eminent Cambridge Society for Early Music in Boston (America’s premier early music presenter), and the Cleveland Orchestra (J.S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion). She has been featured on several live performance-interviews on National Public Radio. Sorrell is dedicated to guiding the next generation of musicians, and has led many projects at the Oberlin Conservatory (of which she is an alumna) including the Oberlin Baroque Orchestra and Oberlin Opera Theatre, as well as an international Bach project with the Youth Orchestra of the Americas. In 2009-2010 she conducted the “Mozart Birthday Concert” at the Cleveland Institute of Music.
Sorrell is the winner of the 1994 Erwin Bodky Award in early music, the 1995 Noah Greenberg Award from the American Musicological Society, the Cleveland Arts Prize, and a special citation from the Mayor of Cleveland. She holds an honorary doctorate from Case Western Reserve University and an Artist Diploma from the Oberlin Conservatory. Her thirteen commercial recordings include Monteverdi’s Vespers and the complete Brandenburg Concerti.