Sligo Baroque Festival

Ensemble Meridiana

Sligo Baroque Festival

The seventeenth Sligo Baroque Festival features a late-night concert of Italian songs as well as concert featuring both J.S. and C.P.E. Bach by Camerata Kilkenny. Children under twelve have free admission to all events.

The seventeeth Sligo Baroque Festival runs from Friday, 28 September, to Sunday, 30 September. Hosted by the Model, the festival is spread between the Model itself and the nearby Calry Church.

The Sligo Baroque Orchestra — which has been going since 1990 — will open the festival in a free event at 7pm on the Friday evening. This is followed at 8pm by Ensemble Meridiana, a group composed of players from four different countries who met while studying at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in Switzerland. The ensemble will perform music for recorder, bassoon, violin, oboe, viola da gamba and harpsichord by Händel and Telemann, but also less well known composers from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries such as Johann Friedrich Fasch, Johann Georg Pisendel and Pierre Prowo.

The harpsichord Colin Booth opens the Saturday with a solo recital at the Model at 1pm. The programme will focus on music from the late Baroque period in Germany. The festival moves to Calry Church at 7.30pm for the main evening concert, with Camerata Kilkenny performing a programme of Johann Sebastian Bach (part of the Musical Offering), his son Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach as well as Haydn and Boccherini. Then, back at the Model, Ensemble Amoroso Foco — the theorbo player Michael Leopold and the soprano Marina Bartoli — give a late night concert. The concert, which begins at 10pm, covers mostly music from Italy from the early seventeenth century.

At 2pm on the Sunday, Maya Homburger performs a solo programme in Calry Church. The Swiss violinist will play Johann Sebastian Bach’s Sonata in A Minor as well as the Partita in D Minor — these will be separated (or rather linked) by Barry Guy’s Aglais, which was written for the performer. Homburger has previously released a recording featuring the two Bach pieces as well as Aglais on her own record label.

The final concert, at 7.30pm in the Model, features Ensemble Meridiana again. The music of the German composer Telemann is the main focus of this concert, with solos, duos and trios for various groupings of the ensemble’s instrumentation. There is also a solo viola da gamba piece by one of Telemann’s contemporaries, Carl Friedrich Abel.

Tickets for the concerts range between €10 and €20 per event. There is also a weekend ticket costing €75, or €55 for concessions. Children under the age of twelve have free admission to all concerts. For online booking, visit here.

sligobaroquefestival.com

Published on 28 September 2012

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