The annual Pacific Baroque Festival has returned for its 19th season, this year with the theme of “music for distracted times.” The festival transports listeners to 17th and 18th century England, to a time when Britain was, for the most part, prospering, and the musical arts were booming. At the time, King Charles II had risen to the monarchy; he was a great lover of music and even had his own private string ensemble, The Four & Twenty Fiddlers.
Pacific Baroque Festival artistic director Marc Destrubé is also a seasoned violinist leading the Pacific Baroque Festival Ensemble; he says that the music at the time was highly explorative, and stirred up the zeitgeist in unexpected ways.
“Seventeenth-century music is just very imaginative, and it was really a time of experimentation,” says Destrubé. “The music is sometimes very expressive, some of the vocal music is actually rather bawdy. We associate the stiff upper lip with England and British people, but certainly the upper lip was not always at all stiff in the 17th century and this comes through in some of the songs and the vocal music.”
Having designed the festival program, Destrubé has discovered new music and new contexts to the time period, and, in certain ways, he feels similar to how an uninitiated listener might feel.
“It’s always great to have my own exploration about how all these composers are related to each other, and how they fit in the larger landscape, both politically, socially, and musically, because when one is so busy learning the next piece and performing it, one doesn’t give much time or thought to how the music one plays fits into the broader context,” says Destrubé. “In essence, looking after the programming, I have had something of the same experience that I hope the audience will have.”
The first performance of the festival is an organ concert; Destrubé says that he programmed the lineup to emulate the rite of passage that affluent young university students underwent following graduation by travelling through Europe to become immersed in artistic culture across the continent.
“The organ concert explores another aspect of English music listening, the tradition of the grand tour, which is the idea that once you finished your schooling you went on a tour of Europe, you visited the capital cities and attended their culture and explored what Europe had to offer culturally,” says Destrubé. “There’s a mix of French and Italian music, as well as a piece from Vivaldi that was arranged for organ, an instrumental piece—just what one might have heard in the 17th and 18th century as an upper-class British traveller on his or her grand tour.”
While we may be able to turn on the radio and easily hear the music of a handful of composers who have dominated the classical music scene over the centuries, Destrubé says that the music on offer at this year’s festival is rare and unlikely to be encountered in popular media.
“The best aspect of a festival is that one can put one’s listening in perspective,” Destrubé says. “I think by attending a festival, you can hear… the composers one knows, but also within the context of what else was going on musically around them. What we discover then is some really wonderful music that we don’t know so well, and so it’s both a chance to hear the music we know in a historical context and also to discover music by other composers of the time, and discover how great that can be, to make new discoveries.”
Pacific Baroque Festival
Various times,
Wednesday, February 15 to Sunday, February 19
Various prices and venues
pacbaroque.com