For the past 18 years, the Pacific Baroque Festival has celebrated classical music that deserves to be heard. This year, audiences were treated to five days of live performances focusing on music composed by, influencing, or inspired by 17th-century German composer Heinrich Schütz. The festival was hosted at the Christ Church Cathedral and the Alix Goolden Hall, and featured a rich variety of baroque classical, including instrumental and choral arrangements.
The festival launched its first evening with a breathtaking solo performance by Christina Hutten, who, with fervent passion, masterfully operated a monolithic church organ for over an hour without intermission. I’ve personally never seen an organ performance before, and with its four keyboards, dozens of foot pedals, and innumerable knobs, switches, pistons, and valves, it puts conventional piano players to shame. As I sat beneath the towering, arched stone ceilings of the cathedral, the sounds reverberated around the building and seemed to come from everywhere at once. It coursed through my body, permeating me with music, and I happily closed my eyes and bathed in it.
Following this were three days of performances in the Alix Goolden Hall, played by a small ensemble of musicians and vocalists on a modest stage. Watching the interactions between the performers was delightful as I listened to their music, because it was clear that they were in their element and they worked really well together. A great example of this was when violinists Marc Destrubé and Kathryn Wiebe finished a song together: as the dulcet tones faded into silence, the two musicians would smile at each other in joy over what was clearly a sublime performance. This sort of camaraderie and support was evident throughout the troupe, and it really gave the feeling that I was observing not a group of mere colleagues, but a sort of family, sharing one of the most visceral emotional experiences art has to offer.
Finally, on Sunday, the festival wrapped up with a program of choral evensong featuring, in addition to the aforementioned ensemble, the Christ Church Cathedral Choir, whose sweeping tones and vocal harmonies created a vibrational synergy which was literally breathtaking. The energy between the performers and the audience was palpable.
We live in a day and age where everything is digital. We listen to music on our mobile devices, we stream movies off of Netflix, we read from our Kindle eBooks, we socialize over Facebook and Twitter, and we keep up with the news via YouTube. In a world where anything analogue is anachronistic, I often fear that the old arts will die out, particularly classical music and theatre. Live performance creates a personal connection between the performer and the audience that cannot be rivaled in any other sort of media, and I am heartened that this art form is still going strong, kept alive by events such as the Pacific Baroque Festival.