What: Early Music Society of the Islands: The Golden Era of the Polish Baroque, with ¡Sacabuche!
When/where: Saturday, 8 p.m., Alix Goolden Hall; pre-concert talk at 7:10 p.m.
Tickets: Adults $27, seniors and students $24, members $20, student rush tickets $8 at the door, subject to availability. Call 250-386-6121; online at tickets.rmts.bc.ca; in person at Ivy’s Book Shop, Munro’s Books, Long & McQuade, and the Royal and McPherson box office
The Early Music Society of the Islands is promoting its concert on Saturday evening under the title The Golden Era of the Polish Baroque, and I know what you’re thinking: Um, so there was a Polish Baroque apparently? Well, there was indeed a Polish Baroque, one splendid enough to justify talk of a “golden era,” and it’s not exactly unknown, either — witness such CDs as Baroque in Poland, Jewels of the Polish Baroque and Music of the Warsaw Castle.
Still, you won’t find composers such as Grzegorz Gerwazy Gorczycki, Jacek Hyancithus Rozycki and Stanislaw Sylwester Szarzynski on those greatest-hits-of-the-Baroque CDs you find in drug stores. But that is precisely one of the attractions of Saturday’s concert, and it is yet another example of EMSI’s fondness for promoting obscure repertoire and giving that special pleasure that comes with being surprised.
EMSI’s programming to date has spanned 1,000 years, ranging from ninth-century Byzantine music to Liszt, and its concessions to familiarity (Bach, Handel and all the other canonical early-music figures) are always balanced by interesting novelties: Recent seasons, for instance, have included 17th-century Italian convent music, Gypsy music and Latin American music, and this season will include some of the earliest known lute repertoire, music by a Jewish composer in early 17th-century Mantua and a celebration of the tercentennial of the birth of C.P.E. Bach.
So what is the Polish Baroque exactly? It is really the Italian Baroque, imported and inflected with local colour. The radical innovations made, beginning around 1600, by such Italian composers as Gabrieli, Caccini, Monteverdi and Frescobaldi proved extraordinarily influential, spreading quickly throughout Europe.
Even in distant Poland, Italian music and musicians were welcomed eagerly, at the royal court in Warsaw, in churches and elsewhere.
Native-born composers absorbed the new Italian idioms but also mixed in elements drawn from their own folk- and art-music traditions, some of which would continue to characterize “Polish style” for centuries (for instance, dance rhythms like those of the mazurka, polonaise and oberek).
Saturday’s introduction to the Polish Baroque will come courtesy of ¡Sacabuche!, an ensemble of sackbuts, strings and voices that made its Victoria debut in 2011, also under EMSI’s auspices. (“Sackbut,” variously spelled, was the most common English name for the early trombone, and among its cognates in other languages was the Spanish “sacabuche,” which may in fact be the earliest form of the term.)
¡Sacabuche!, which grew out of a student ensemble at Indiana University in Bloomington, was founded in 2009. It has since performed in concerts and at early-music festivals and symposiums around the U.S., and has visited China twice, in 2010 and in June of this year. It is directed by trombonist Linda Pearse, who is from Yellow Point (near Ladysmith), spent more than a decade studying and performing in Europe, and currently teaches at Indiana and at Mount Allison University, in Sackville, N.B.
The ensemble specializes in Italian and Italian-style vocal and instrumental music of the late 16th and early 17th centuries — a heyday for early brass instruments.
Its previous concert in Victoria featured music from Venice and from German-speaking centres that had imported the Venetian style, and in China it performed a collaborative, multicultural, interdisciplinary program celebrating the 400th anniversary of the death of Matteo Ricci, the Italian Jesuit priest, mathematician, astronomer and cartographer who founded China’s Catholic missions.
Saturday’s program comprises music by six composers — all native Poles, all bearing names seemingly designed to torment the Anglo tongue, and all undoubtedly new to most local listeners. (The one apparently born the earliest, Mikolaj Zielenski, flourished around 1610; the baby among them, Gorczycki, died in 1734.)
The program reflects the very wide range of Italian music imported into Poland in the 17th century: It includes music in conservative late-Renaissance styles as well as in the revolutionary idioms of the early Baroque, and it is divided more or less equally between instrumental genres (canzona, sonata) and sacred-vocal music in Latin (polyphonic motet, accompanied monody), some of the latter set to familiar texts like the Magnificat.
As it did in 2011, ¡Sacabuche! will appear here with a touring contingent of eight instrumentalists and vocalists: three sackbut players (including Pearse on a bass specimen), two violinists, two singers (soprano and bass) and a continuo organist.
