Vera Plosila is a PhD candidate at the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts.

More information about Vera Plosila

The traverso player Vera Plosila is one of the active voices of young Finnish early musicians. She holds a Master’s diploma from the Royal Conservatoire The Hague (2016) as well as the Sibelius Academy Helsinki (2019). Plosila has featured as an orchestral musician with the groups Finnish Baroque Orchestra, Helsinki Baroque Orchestra, Ensemble Nylandia, Weimar Baroque, Trondheim Barokk and Amsterdam Corelli Collective. In 2016 she was selected as one of the finalists of the EAR-ly soloists’ competition held at the BRQ Vantaa Festival.

Plosila’s most recent projects include a collaboration with Q Ensemble Berlin, based on the Händel cantata Mi palpita il cor HWV 132c. The piece is extended through a contemporary commission from Andreas Arend into a stage work. During summer 2021, Plosila led a collaboration project between the three Nordic early-music groups Ensemble Nylandia (FI), Camerata Öresund (SE/DK) and Cantoque Ensemble (IS), focusing on the connections of German and Nordic eighteenth-century court music. The initiative continues in 2022 as a collaboration between ensembles Nylandia, Hyperborea (NO), and Estonian Baroque Ensemble (EE). Here the focus is on Nordic, Baltic and German high-Baroque repertoire from the Düben manuscript collection.

In 2021 Plosila started her doctoral studies at the Leiden University as a part of the Dutch-Flemish docARTES program. Her research dives onto the aesthetic philosophy discussed at the Berlin Montagsklub in the 1750–70’s and its connection to the circle’s instrumental chamber music. Apart from performing and research, Plosila is keenly interested in historical music pedagogy.

veraplosila.com

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PUBLICATIONS

Singing in the Contemporary Traverso Classroom (2019)

Master's thesis, The University of the Arts Helsinki / The Sibelius Academy

Research

My research focuses on theories of the sublime by the Berlin Enlightenment philosophers Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86) and Johann Georg Sulzer (1720–79). Both were active in the group Montagsklub, whose other members included the playwright Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, poet Karl Wilhelm Rammler, writer–composer Christian Gottfried Krause, flutist Johann Joachim Quantz and organist–singer Johann Friedrich Agricola. Closely associated with Montagsklub were also other court musicians, such as Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. The members discussed contemporary aesthetic thought from England, France and Germany. My first objective is to inquire how the sublime was theorized in the circle during the 1750–70’s.

Mid-century Berlin also saw a growing esteem for instrumental music, which was strongly related to the time’s aesthetic preferences. The ineffable quality became an expressive asset in the time’s aesthetic thought. Thus, I want to discover how an acquired sensibility towards the mid-century aesthetic theories can aid the performance of the Montagsklub circle’s instrumental chamber music.

Activities