From post-Soviet Siberia to Baroque castles to the Hamel Music Center in Madison, Taya König-Tarasevich is putting her futuristic touch on historical performance.
By Maggie Ginsberg, Division of the Arts
Imagine you are inside a German castle, surrounded by the renowned, world-class musicians of Verità Baroque. They don’t stand apart on a stage; instead, they form a circle around you, placing the audience at the center of the sound. Historic instruments — baroque flute, violins, viola, lute, cello, double bass, and harpsichord — echo off decorated walls and back to you at the center, bringing 300-year-old music to life for an audience of one.
Now slide off the VR goggles and remove the headphones. You’re not in Germany — you’re at UW–Madison’s Hamel Music Center.
This is a demo of The Immersive Project: an innovative, 360-degree audio and video experience recorded live in five German castles during the pandemic by the Verità Baroque ensemble. The ensemble’s co-founder and artistic director, Siberian-born flutist Taya König-Tarasevich, moved to Madison in 2024. She joined the historical music teaching faculty at the Mead Witter School of Music — and brought a demo of the high-tech experience with her.
“This hasn’t existed in America, and I want our students to experience it,” says König-Tarasevich, who is also the new director of the revived Madison Early Music Festival. For 2026, she plans to make the demo available at the festival and fly in five members of Verità to perform through the Division of the Arts International Visiting Artists Program. She has also collaborated with hip-hop instructors from the Dance Department and with her husband, quantum physicist Elio König, a new tenure-track assistant professor in the Department of Physics, to bring modern — even futuristic — interpretations to the time-honored festival.
“I want UW–Madison students and everyone to see that early music isn’t a museum piece,” she says. “It’s alive, urgent, and full of spark. Breaking the myth that early music is boring or outdated is central to my work.”
At the core of König-Tarasevich’s mission to attract new and younger audiences to historic music is her own remarkable childhood. When she was a little girl surviving the post-Soviet chaos of the 1990s, her family’s cassette machine — playing Mozart on loop — provided a rare safe space.
“It was anarchy: starving, horrifying events every day, people being killed,” she says. “But the only cassette I owned was just magic to me. It made me feel like, as long as music is being played, nothing bad can happen.”
But it wasn’t until she was eight years old, and saw a girl playing the flute, that she realized that the miraculous music coming from the machine was actually made by humans — that maybe she, too, could learn to play.
“I didn’t know you could make music like this, you know? That you could create that magic, that healing space for everyone around,” König-Tarasevich says.
She became, in her words, “totally obsessed.”
At 16, she enrolled in modern flute studies in St. Petersburg, Russia. Two years later, she heard about a professor in Germany who attracted applicants from all over the world competing for one of 100 spots. König-Tarasevich spoke no German and knew no one in the country, but she got in. While earning her bachelor’s degree at the Hochschule für Musik Karlsruhe, two more life-changing things happened: she met and married Elio, and she was introduced to the Baroque flute.
Early music (roughly, music from the Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque periods) immediately resonated with König-Tarasevich — particularly Baroque, for its “drastic contrasts between light and shadow, dramatic differences in effects, and the freedom to improvise and ornament,” she says. She loved learning the history and performing the music on the original instruments, as its composers intended. But she always found the traditional concert experience too limiting, both as a performer and as a patron.
“The first row gets to see everything and hear the worst sound, because it’s not yet mixed. They also wake up with neck pain because they had to look up all evening,” she says. “The last row hears the best mix but doesn’t see anything. In a way it’s a compromise of bad experiences, and no one is truly happy.”
Instead, she says, she was inspired when she learned the German word hautnah, which translates to “as close as your skin.” She wanted audiences to feel the music as closely as she did, but she didn’t yet know how to make that happen.
In six years, König-Tarasevich became fluent in five languages, amassed 20 flutes, and earned multiple graduate and postgraduate degrees from three different institutions: Switzerland’s Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, the University of Michigan, and The Juilliard School. She graduated from Juilliard in 2020 with a packed global performance schedule ahead of her — just in time to watch it evaporate overnight.
But much like the unexpected respite that music provided in her childhood, the challenging pandemic era brought inspiration. Out of that time came Verità Baroque.
“When COVID hit, I felt like, well, I’ve been given time to think about what it is that I want to change in this world — the very purpose of my artistic existence,” König-Tarasevich says. “And it was that concert experience.”
In December 2020, Verità Baroque came together swiftly and naturally. The world-leading musicians partnered with scientists, cinematographers, and sound engineers to record immersive video and audio using cutting-edge technology in Baroque castles, grounded in a commitment to actualize Baroque culture. They received a grant from the German government to create immersive pop-up theaters at railway stations, helping people reimagine the traditional concert experience.
They also held educational performances and enlisted living composers-in-residence to write new music for Baroque instruments, dedicating it exclusively to Verità.
Then her husband accepted a tenure-track position at UW–Madison in fall 2024, and the couple moved to the United States. König-Tarasevich kept her commitment to Verità but signed on to teach at the School of Music part time, determined — as always — to make the biggest impact wherever she is.
In another example of that impact, König-Tarasevich co-founded the year-long, tuition-free Global Impact Musician Program, which holistically empowers young East African musicians through self-development, professional and social-emotional learning, artistic growth, leadership, and global collaboration, culminating in a capstone residency at UW–Madison.
When she was appointed to revive the Madison Early Music Festival — dormant since its founders, Cheryl Bensman-Rowe and Paul Rowe, retired — she knew she wanted to honor their legacy while also reimagining the festival for new audiences, rethinking what early music can mean for the artists and audiences of today. Her vision expands the traditional MEMF community to include families and the broader student body, creating a slate of new programming that brings full circle all that she’s experienced so far.
“If not now, when do we need to be reunited?” she says. “Music, our universal language, has the power to heal the wounds of our society. I have experienced this transformation myself, and I am called to share that power with you.”
Learn more about the 2026 Madison Early Music Festival, “Uniting the Arts,” including Dr. Elio J. König lecture-recital “Quantz & Physics,” delivered on the 100th anniversary of Schrödinger’s seminal paper.