Salish Sea Music Festival Brings Broken Consort

 Saturday, March 23 at 5 p.m., Orcas Adventist Fellowship Church

From Jeffrey Cohan

The third annual Salish Sea Early Music Festival on Orcas Island continues at the Orcas Adventist Fellowship Church with renaissance flutist Jeffrey Cohan, violinist Courtney Kuroda, violist Steven Creswell and harpsichordist Kyobi Hinami in “The Broken Consort in Milan, Paris and London.”

The program will explore late renaissance and early baroque works between 1570 and 1630 on period instruments. A consort is considered “broken” when instruments from different families (in this case wind, string and plucked) are brought together, and a “broken” melody is an ornamented one.

Broken consorts of all sorts, made up of instruments from different families, were ubiquitous throughout Europe and celebrated in particular by early 17th-century English composers. The virtuosic embellishment of vocal melodies was highly cultivated by instrumentalists, particularly in Italy, as a new concept of chordal accompaniment evolved, but was resisted for decades by many composers who chose to intensify the dynamic interaction of independent instrumental voices in the earlier manner, ever more with violinistic flair. All of these aspects of this great chamber music from the decades around the turn of the 17th century are to be illustrated in “The Broken Consort in Milan, London and Paris”, with Venice thrown in for good measure.

During the decades before and after 1600, Milan, London and Paris were vibrant centers of chamber music activity that holds many mysteries.

Between 1580 and 1628 in Milan and the surrounding region, a center of compositional activity rivaled in Italy only by Venice, the instrumental canzona blossomed in print and performance concurrently with intense development among violin makers and players. In France the “airs de cour” and extravagant court ballets from the 1570’s represented a new Italian-influenced French model of dramatic expression, which followed an increased appreciation in France earlier in the century for the interpretation of vocal music by transverse flutes and other instruments.

As in January’s “The Little Evening Concerts for Louis XIV”, this program explores a unique musical palette and language of expressive nuance from another all but forgotten musical arena, performed on instruments such as the renaissance transverse flute that are seldom to be heard today. Among the composers to be represented are Giovanni Paulo and Andrea Cima, Giovanni Bassano, Girolamo Frescobaldi, William Byrd, William Lawes, Thomas Morely and Pierre Guédron.

Additional performances in the San Juan Islands: Lopez Island: Saturday afternoon, March 23, 2013 at 1:00 PM at Grace Church, 468-3477, and San Juan Island: Sunday, March 24, 2013 at 7:00 PM at San Juan Island Grange, 378-6632.

Suggested donation $15 or $20; 18 and under free; other students $5. For further information for the view www.salishseafestival.org or (360) 376-6683.

“Broken Consort” is the second of four 2013 Salish Sea Early Music Festival performances on Orcas Island from January through June with some of the world’s most accomplished performers on period instruments from Germany, Montreal, Eugene, Los Angeles and elsewhere in the Northwest.