Submitted by the Salish Sea Early Music Festival.
The Salish Sea Early Music Festival’s exploration of “Folk Song from Three Centuries” continues with “Renaissance Psalms, Irish Baroque and Folk” on Saturday, June 14 at noon, (rescheduled from June 7 at 12:30 p.m.) at St. David’s Episcopal Church, with a completely new and innovative program further traversing unexplored territory in the realm of folk-inspired art music from the Renaissance, Baroque and Romantic periods, performed on plucked instruments and transverse flutes from three centuries, and highlighting collaboration between prominent musicians of these periods.
Oleg Timofeyev will be playing lute, English guitar and 1820 seven-string guitar, and Jeffrey Cohan will play Renaissance descant, tenor and bass, Baroque and 1820 eight-keyed flutes.
Flutist Jacob Van Eyck and lutenist Nicolas Vallet and their colleagues often played with one another around 1620 and did not necessarily compose their settings of psalms and other popular melodies to be played unaccompanied. We juxtapose these settings and variations in a way that sheds light on the nature of these get-togethers and the basic context and character of this extensive repertoire.
Timofeyev’s rare but once extremely popular wire-strung English guitar made in London in 1761, which acquired popularity in countries outside of England also, will be heard with Baroque flute performing the folk tunes of Scotland and Ireland as interpreted and varied by the early 18th-century composers Francesco Barsanti and Turlough O’Carolan, in addition to a new selection of the charming flower-inspired and Scottish folk-infused arias from “Airs for the Four Seasons” by Scotsman James Oswald.
Finally, an Eastern European seven-string guitar made in 1820 in Russia alongside an eight-keyed flute made in London in the same year bring to life variations from about 1825 on popular opera tunes by virtuoso guitarist Louis-Ange Carpentras in collaboration with virtuoso flutist Benoit Tranquille Berbiguer, as well as the fruits of a second collaboration between guitarist Ferdinando Carulli and flutist Jean-Louis Tulou. These four musicians are all still familiar to flutists and guitarists today, although their instruments were not the modern ones to which we are accustomed.
As one can imagine, we’re excited about this material, we have much more exploring to do and we hope you’ll join us!
With many thanks to St. David’s Episcopal Church for enabling our sharing of this music with you.
There is a free-will offering; pay as you wish — 18 and under free
Learn more at www.salishseafestival.org/sanjuan.
