PREVIEW

What: Baroque Festival: Music for the Sun King

When/Where: Feb. 9, 11 a.m., Alix Goolden Hall; Feb. 9-11, 8 p.m., Alix Goolden Hall, with pre-concert discussion at 7: 15; Feb. 12, 4: 30 p.m., Christ Church Cathedral

Tickets: $20 to $30; festival passes $100/$80; Feb. 12 free. Call 2503865311; online at pacbaroque.com; in person at the Victoria Conservatory of Music, Cadboro Bay Book Co., Ivy's Book Shop, Long & McQuade, Tanner's Books, Munro's Books, and La Tavola.

Details: pacbaroque.com

French Baroque music, often unjustly overshadowed by contemporary Italian and German repertoire, will get a welcome boost here beginning next Thursday, in the eighth annual Pacific Baroque Festival.

The festival's five concerts will explore 17th and 18th century music for church and chamber, opera and ballet, voices and instruments, and ensembles large and small.

While not neglecting the biggest names of the French Baroque (Lully, Couperin, Rameau), the program will draw on a host of less familiar but interesting composers (Lalande, Sieur de Machy, Mondonville and so on) plus some contemporary Germans (including Bach and Telemann) dressed in their best French garb.

Once again, this year's festival will showcase accomplished period-instrument performers from the Pacific Northwest - local flutist Soile Stratkauskas, gambist Natalie Mackie from Vancouver, harpsichordist Byron Schenkman from Seattle - as well as Christ Church Cathedral's St. Christopher Singers and the Victoria Children's Choir.

The artistic director is violinist Marc Destrubé, a Victoria native now living in Vancouver who has performed with major period-instrument ensembles all over the world and was a founding member of the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra in Toronto.

And once again, Destrubé will bring with him the ensemble he helped found and long directed - the Pacific Baroque Orchestra - to participate in three concerts.

The orchestra's Feb. 10 program, focused on theatrical music, will demonstrate the early-18th century stylistic ideal known as les goûts réunis ("tastes reunited"), a melding of the best elements of French and Italian music.

Its Feb. 11 concert, comprising both orchestral and choral music, will pay tribute to history's first important concert series, the Concert Spirituel, which, from 1725 to 1790, was a centrepiece of musical life in Paris; the program will include Bach's familiar Overture in B Minor and the Messe des morts (Requiem Mass) by Jean Gilles, which was immensely popular in 18th century France.

The festival closes on Feb. 12 with, as usual, an expansion of Christ Church's regular Sunday afternoon choral evensong service. (In past festivals, this free event has attracted hundreds of people.)

The program will focus on the gorgeous choral motets by Henry Du Mont published in 1652 for "ladies of religious orders," but there will be instrumental music, too, including a violin sonata composed, appropriately, by a woman: Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, a prolific and versatile musician much favoured in the court of Louis XIV.

This year's festival will showcase one bona fide star: Italian viola da gamba virtuoso Paolo Pandolfo, who has been a significant presence in early-music circles for more than 30 years.

A former pupil and colleague of the pioneering Spanish gambist Jordi Savall, Pandolfo lives and teaches in Basel, Switzerland, records prolifically and tours the world as a soloist and as director of the viol ensemble Labyrinto.

In addition to contributing to the Feb. 10 program, Pandolfo will appear in two concerts on Feb. 9.

The first is at 11 a.m. but is well worth playing hooky for: a tempting chamber-music program including one of Couperin's delectable Concerts royaux and works by the gambists Jean de Sainte-Colombe and Marin Marais, who were teacher and pupil (and subjects of the 1991 French film Tous les matins du monde).

That evening, Pandolfo will offer a solo recital of French and French-inspired music, including an arrangement of one of Bach's cello suites. He will also perform his own compositions.

"The gamba," he says, "thanks to its natural versatility, is capable of moving easily between disparate musical vocabularies and styles," making it "the perfect instrument" for building bridges between past and present.

Pandolfo's virtuosity and winning musical personality have won him widespread acclaim.

The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, which is not given to idle hyperbole, notes that he "has delighted audiences with his fresh, wildly inventive, improvisatory approach."

It is surely no coincidence that, early in life, he played jazz and popular music on the double bass and guitar.

A devotee of improvisation, he believes passionately in restoring the more fluid boundary between composition and performance that existed in earlier centuries.

Incidentally, there will be still more French Baroque fare to be heard here in the coming months: a program of vocal and instrumental chamber music sponsored by the Early Music Society of the Islands (March 31); some Easter-themed sacred music in early April, and an intimate mini-festival devoted to keyboard and chamber repertoire in May.

Kevinbazzana@shaw.ca