Soprano Elissa Edwards and Élan Ensemble 

American soprano Elissa Edwards performs as a soloist in the United States and internationally with a focus on historically informed performances of 17th and 18th century repertoire. As the artistic director of Élan Productions and artist-in-residence at the Hammond-Harwood House Museum in Annapolis, Maryland, Ms. Edwards has won many awards and grants for her creative contributions and scholarly presentations of classical music, including a Winterthur Maker-Creator Research Fellowship in the 2018–19 season for her project “Beyond Just ‘A Lady with a Harp’: Illuminating and Contextualizing Female Musicians in the Early American Republic.”
Edwards returned to Winterthur in the spring of 2021 to create the soundtrack in Outside In: Nature-Inspired Design at Winterthur, with a combination of song selections from the Winterthur Library collection and sounds captured in the Winterthur garden. The songs reflect the pastoral style which romanticizes rural life. Composers often used wind instruments to mimic birdsong, which is demonstrated by the flute in these songs. Edwards describes the soundtrack as a “unique interplay of music that gives way to an illustration of life and the passage of time in all seasons experienced in the Winterthur Gardens.”