SUBMITTED BY SALT SPRING BAROQUE
Summer Baroque in the Trees is Salt Spring Baroque’s two-day concert festival that grew from a desire to keep presenting concerts during the Covid-19 pandemic. We learned that it was safer to attend events outside, and so Summer Baroque in the Trees was born.
People are invited to come and sit amongst the arbutus and Douglas firs, watch the deer saunter by, and enjoy some beautiful baroque music beginning at 2 p.m. each day on a private Channel Ridge property.
On Saturday, July 27, Salt Spring Baroque will present The Gallo Chamber Players violin trio, with members Majka Demcak, Rebecca Ruthven and Jiten Beairsto. Their concert Crossroads & Consolations will include the rarely-performed Sonata for Three Violins by Austrian composer Johann Joseph Fux, the Adagio from the Die Relenge (“Tree Frog”) Violin Concerto by Georg Friedrich Telemann, the virtuosic Violin Concerto by Italian composer Francesco Durante, and a new set of pieces entitled Consolations by Rebecca Nelson, which travels seamlessly between baroque, folk and contemporary classical music.
The second concert on Sunday, July 28 will feature Concerti a Due Cori in its first antiphonal concert on two stages. One of the first composers writing solely for instruments was Giovanni Gabrieli (1554-1612). Gabrieli, while the organist at St. Marks Basilica in Venice, perfected a compositional technique known as cori spezzati, where composers would contrast different instrumentalists by placing them in different areas of the sanctuary. One ensemble would play the “call” and another give the “response” in a musical back and forth known as antiphonal performance.
This concert will feature sackbuts (Jeremy Berkman and Marcus Hissen), dulcians (Katrina Russell and Kerry Graham), violins (Paul Luchkow and Kathryn Wiebe), cornetto (Bill Jamieson) and recorders (Marea Chernoff and Jamieson), with works by Canale, Gabrieli, Marini, Cavaccio, Picchi, Viadana, Chedeville and others.
People should bring a lawn chair, hat and water. No dogs, please.
More information is on the saltspringbaroque.com website. Tickets may also be purchased there, or at the ArtSpring box office.