Salish Sea Early Music Festival returns on June 30

||| FROM JEFFREY COHAN for SALISH SEA EARLY MUSIC FESTIVAL |||

Baroque in Transition: The Treble Viol is the final 2026 Salish Sea Early Music Festival performance, to feature treble viol player Annalisa Pappano, baroque guitarist William Simms, and Jeffrey Cohan on baroque and renaissance flutes.

The concert, presented in collaboration with Orcas Adventist Fellowship Church, takes place on Tuesday, June 30, 2026 at 5:00 PM at Orcas  Adventist Fellowship Church at 107 Enchanted Forest Road in Eastsound. Admission is by suggested donation (a free will offering) of $20 to $30. Those 18 & under are free.  All are welcome regardless of donation. For additional information please see www.salishseafestival.org/orcas. 

Please see our complete schedule below of this performance on San Juan (6/27 afternoon), Lopez (6/27 evening) and Orcas (6/30) Islands.

• ABOUT THE PROGRAM
The transition in instrumental music as the Renaissance flowered into the Baroque through the 17th century will be explored through the perspective of the treble viol, the smaller fretted cousin of the viola da gamba, alongside transverse flutes of both the Renaissance and the  Baroque, and the 17th-century guitar.

The canzona appeared in the 1570’s as a more vocally inspired instrumental form in contrast to the ricercare of the renaissance. It
evolved into the familiar sonata as it exhibited ever more instrumentally virtosic colors through the mid 1600’s. At this time
diverging Italian and French styles prompted intense intellectual clashes between their proponents.

The program will  proceed with renaissance transverse flute (as opposed  to recorder) and music by early 17th-century Italian composers Tarquino Merula, Bartolomé de Selma y Salaverde, Marco Uccelini, Giovanni Paulo Cima and Giovanni Battista Buonamente, to mid 17th-century English composer Matthew Locke and virtuoso embellishments for treble viol by German composer Johannes Schop. Works by Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Lully and Italian violinist Archangelo Corelli which appeared in the same manuscript at the court of Louis XIV in 1695 are to be heard, performed on baroque transverse flute, as well as a Suite by early 18th-century French composer Louis-Antoine Dornel from 1713, shortly before the death of Louis XIV and at the end of a musical era.