Salish Sea Early Music Festival Returns with “An Elizabethan Broken Consort”

This illustration from the "Flemish Book of Hours" dating from the late 1470s, shows musicians such as may have played the works of composers to be heard in the "Elizabethan Broken Consort" on March 5 and 6

By Jeffrey Cohan

On March 5 and 6 on San Juan, Lopez and Orcas Islands, the Salish Sea Early Music Festival presents “An Elizabethan Broken Consort” which will explore renaissance chamber music with Jeffrey Cohan, renaissance transverse flutes; Courtney Kuroda, violin; and Lisa Michele Lewis, harpsichord and virginals (a small renaissance keyboard instrument).

The program will take place on Orcas Island on Saturday afternoon, March 5 at 1:30 p.m. at Odd Fellows Hall in Eastsound, on Lopez Island on Saturday evening, March 5 at 7 p.m. at Grace Church. The next day, Sunday, March 6, it will be performed on San Juan Island at 7 p.m. at St. David’s Church in Friday Harbor.

The suggested donation, a free will offering towards expenses, will be $15 for all concerts. Youth 18 and under are free. For further information the public is requested to call Grace Church at (360) 468-3477 on Lopez Island, Odd Fellows Hall at (360) 376-5640 on Orcas Island, and St. David’s Church at (360) 378-5360 in Friday Harbor. Please see www.concertspirituel.org for further information.

“An Elizabethan Broken Consort” will celebrate Renaissance chamber music from the reign of Queen Elisabeth I of England. Works by English composers Thomas Morley, Orlando Gibbons, John Baldwyn and Hugh Ashton will be presented alongside Italian and French works of the period, and compared with works predating Elizabeth’s coronation in 1558, and others written after her death in 1603 which illustrate the transition from the Renaissance to the new Baroque style.

While some are purely instrumental, others are based on the beautiful vocal melodies of the period. All can require the utmost virtuosity from the performers as the complex improvisational style which developed towards the end of Elizabeth’s rule rivaled today’s jazz improvisation.

A renaissance “consort” of different sizes of like renaissance instruments was considered “broken” when instruments from different families, such as lutes, stringed instruments or recorders, were brought together. This Broken Consort performance will feature music from 1500 through 1650 for the very seldom heard renaissance transverse tenor and bass flutes with violin and harpsichord. Two renaissance keyboard instruments, the harpsichord and the virginals, will be featured.

The Performers

Courtney Kuroda studied with Haroutune Bedelian at the University of California, Irvine and received her Master’s degree in performance from Indiana University’s prestigious Early Music Institute where she studied with Stanley Ritchie. She performs with a variety of chamber ensembles and orchestras throughout the U.S., including LA Baroque, Ars Antigua in Chicago, Opera Lafayette in Washington D.C and the Indianapolis Baroque Orchestra. Ms. Kuroda recently performed at the Boston Early Music Festival with Les Brunettes and is currently active in the Seattle area performing with Baroque Northwest, Seattle Pro Musica, Concert Spirituel and the Seattle Baroque Orchestra. Courtney recently recorded Antonio Sacchini’s “Oedipe à Colone” with Opera Lafayette under the Naxos label.

Lisa Michele Lewis received a M.Mus degree in harpsichord from the University of Washington, where she studied with Carole Terry and Margriet Tindemans.  Other harpsichord teachers include Elizabeth Wright and Byron Schenkman.  Ms. Lewis has performed both on harpsichord and piano with most of the Northwest’s major orchestras and chamber music groups, including the Seattle Symphony, the Northwest Sinfonietta, Orchestra Seattle, the Bellevue Philharmonic, Concert Spirituel and Baroque Northwest. She will be featured soloist in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 9 E flat Major, K271 with the Vashon-Maury Chamber Orchestra on March 26.

Flutist Jeffrey Cohan has performed as soloist in 25 countries, most recently Ukraine, Slovenia and Germany, on all transverse flutes from the Renaissance through the present, and has won the Erwin Bodky Award (Boston) and the top prize in the Flanders Festival International Concours Musica Antiqua (Brugge, Belgium), two of the most important prizes for period instrument performance in America and Europe. He has premiered many concerti and other works by Slovenian and American composers. He directs the Capitol Hill Chamber Music Festival in Washington, DC, the Black Hawk Chamber Music Festival in Illinois and Iowa and the Salish Sea Early Music Festival. He can “play many superstar flutists one might name under the table” according to the New York Times, and is “The Flute Master” according to the Boston Globe.