Louis XIV The Sun King’s Music
The second annual 2012 Salish Sea Early Music Festival presents five programs of early chamber music on period instruments on Vashon Island on Thursday evenings through May featuring some of the most accomplished performers on period instruments from around the country and Europe. We hope you’ll join us!
The Sun King’s Music features the fabulous instruments and music with which Louis XIV and his court was familiar at a pitch more than two half steps below modern pitch, which lends a sumptuousness to the instruments and music that may never before have been experienced in a complete chamber music performance in the Pacific Northwest and for which the acoustics at Vashon United Methodist Church are ideal.
Blendulf, Lenti and Cohan will "channel" members of the king’s "Musique de la Chambre", one of the primary divisions of the king’s musical establishment, which included flutists René Pignon Descoteaux and Philibert Rebillé, who made fashionable the new 3-piece baroque form of the transverse flute. They serenaded Louis XIV from at least 1667, and were joined as members of the "Musique de la Chambre" by viola da gambist Marin Marais in 1679 and in 1680 by guitarist Robert de Visée, the king’s guitar instructor from 1695 who regularly played at the king’s bedside and in private concerts for Mme de Maintenon. This concert features a three-piece copy of a flute made in about 1700 by Jacques Hotteterre, the most famous flutist from Louis XIV’s last decades. Several unpublished late 17th-century manuscripts from the Library of Congress and the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris will be featured.
Joanna Blendulf is one of the foremost specialists upon the rarely heard pardessus de viole, which emerged as a new soprano member of the viola da gamba family in the late 17th-century and is played upright in the lap.
Thursday, January 19, at 7:30 PM
Vashon United Methodist Church
17928 Vashon Highway SW
(206) 463-9804
$20 or $15 suggested donation
18 and under always free
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