This week’s trivia question: What did the lute symbolize in Dutch Golden Age paintings?
Alon Sariel is a musician who was born and raised in the city of Beersheba, in southern Israel. As a mandolinist and lutenist, as well as a conductor, he is at home with both early and new music.
Although he has specialized in baroque music, Alon has worked with many different genres from folk to avant-garde, and collaborated with a wide spectrum of artists in many areas. As a soloist and member of different ensembles, Alon Sariel has toured throughout Europe, North and South America, the Middle East and Africa. He has appeared at festivals such as the Salzburger Biennale for New Music and the Early Music Festival in Utrecht, and won numerous international competitions, prizes and awards. Sariel has also been actively engaged in several socio-political projects including Yehudi Menuhin’s Live Music Now and Daniel Barenboim’s West-Eastern Divan.

Alon currently resides in Hanover, Germany, where he is musical director of the international Baroque orchestra Concerto Foscari and founding member of the Baroque music quartet PRISMA, with whom he was awarded the first prize at the International Biber Competition in Austria
in 2015.

He has just released his new album “Rembrandt!”, which pays tribute to the great painter of the Dutch Golden Age, and celebrates the music of this unique era. This project also has to do with the Portuguese Congregation of Amsterdam and its community in the Golden Age, particularly
Menasseh ben Israel, who assisted Rembrandt with Hebrew inscriptions in his paintings. Next season Alon will lead the Jerusalem Baroque Orchestra in a program titled “The Jewish Rembrandt” in Jerusalem, Haifa and Tel Aviv.