Submitted by the Salish Sea Early Music Festival

At 7 p.m., Sunday, March 11, the Salish Sea Early Music Festival will present a mostly Italian Four-Part Canzonas entitled “Shakespeare in Italy” at Brickworks in Friday Harbor. The program will feature dulcian, or baroque bassoon, player Anna Marsh, renaissance transverse flutist Jeffrey Cohan, violinist Courtney Kuroda, and violist Stephen Creswell.

Admission is by suggested donations of $15, $20 or $25. Those 18 and under are free.

The concert will also be performed at 1 p.m., Sunday, March, 11, at the Orcas Adventist Fellowship Church, at 107 Enchanted Forest Rd. in Eastsound; and at 7 p.m., Monday, March 12 at Grace Church, at 70 Sunset Ln. on Lopez.

This program explores a unique language of expressive nuance, performed on the period instruments that bring this music to life, including renaissance transverse flute and dulcian, or renaissance bassoon, which vary greatly in tone and technique from instruments used just a few decades later. This quartet of flute, bassoon, violin and viola is representative of the “broken consorts,” made up of more than one family of instruments, which were once commonplace. Four-part songs, from the 16th-century, inspired Italian composers to write these instrumental four-part canzonas, which blossomed in print and performance between 1580 and 1628. Among the composers from Shakespeare’s lifetime to be represented are Floriano Canale, Andrea Cima, Giacomo Filippo Biumi, and Fiorentio Maschera, Hugh Ashton, and other English and French composers.

The Salish Sea Early Music Festival has featured some of the finest period instrument specialists for eight years. The event presents music from the Renaissance through the time of Beethoven on period instruments in Friday Harbor. For information, visit www.salishseafestival.org/sanjuan.

2018 Schedule

Each performance of the Salish Sea Early Music Festival will be held at Brickworks in Friday Harbor.

Four Part Canzonas 1585-1625: 7 p.m., Sunday, March 11

A rarely-heard Italian four-part canzona, inspired by four-part French and Flemish chansons, which blossomed in print from 1582 to 1628 concurrently with the emerging “baroque” style.

The Instrumental Air De Cour: 7 p.m., Friday, April 13

The intensely moving and intimate vocal French air de cour, which inspired instrumentalists from the late 16th century and yielded trends that resonated still in the early 1700s.

The Capable Virtuoso: 1 p.m., Sunday, May 20

Johann Mattheson’s “The Capable Virtuoso”, published in Hamburg in 1720, sets the tone for this program of trio sonatas inspired by Corelli and the idea that Italian, French, and German styles might be fused in an integrated musical style.

Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto: 1 p.m., Sunday, May 27

The fifth Brandenburg Concerto by Johann Sebastian Bach and other works for flute, violin, harpsichord and string chamber orchestra.

Frederick the Great: 7 p.m. Friday, June 8

Slvius Leopold Weiss, the most prolific and highly esteemed lutenist of the baroque and teacher of Frederick the Great, wrote sonatas for obbligato lute and flute from which this program branches out to explore music at the court of the flutist King Frederick II of Prussia.