SFEMS Presents Meeting of Fiddle and Violin

Yesterday afternoon in St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, the San Francisco Early Music Society (SFEMS) presented a return visit by Musica Pacifica, which had last performed for SFEMS in November of 2016. The ensemble consisted of Judith Linsenberg on recorders, violinist Ingrid Matthews, cellist William Skeen, Charles Sherman on harpsichord, and percussionist Peter Maund. The title of the program was Airs of Caledonia: Baroque and Traditional Music of Scotland and England; and it featured a guest appearance by David Greenberg, whose expertise includes not only historically-informed baroque music but also Cape Breton fiddling.

Most of the program involved the traditional side of the historical legacy. Greenberg brought engaging spontaneity to his performances of the traditional repertoire, many of which involved his own arrangements. As was the case in the programming for Saturday evening’s Voices of Music concert (which also happened to take place in St. Mark’s), there was a clear sense that the performances suggested that the practice of “jamming” reached back far earlier than jazz traditions. Thus, the members of Musica Pacifica were easily drawn into Greenberg’s jamming, resulting in a particularly spirited SFEMS occasion.

That spirit of jamming even found its way into the “concert domain.” The final set of the first half of the program was entitled Purcell with a Chaser. Greenberg provided arrangements of selections of six pieces Henry Purcell had composed for different theatrical productions. The “chaser” consisted of two Scottish tunes; and the transition could not have been more seamless (suggesting that many Purcell favorites may well have grown from seeds planted in more traditional soil).

During the second half of the program, the Musica Pacifica players presented two “concert” offerings, somewhat in the spirit of Greenberg’s repertoire. In the first of these Matthews gave a formidable account of an over-the-top chaconne composed by the Italian violinist Nicola Matteis, who had moved to London. (Matteis himself referred to the variations in this chaconne as “Diverse bizzarie.”) This was followed by a trio sonata by the “Caledonian” composer William McGibbon, explicitly declared to be an “Imitation of Corelli.”

Taken as a whole, the program offered a generous tour of unfamiliar territory, all given a sufficiently spirited account to maintain audience attention from beginning to end.