Linfield College invites the community to celebrate the holiday season with the Portland Baroque Orchestra. The ensemble will perform Wednesday, Dec. 2, at 7:30 p.m. in the Richard and Lucille Ice Auditorium in Melrose Hall.
The orchestra gives audiences an opportunity to experience music as it sounded almost 300 years ago, performing on instruments as old as the music. Original instruments and their replicas produce an orchestral texture very different from their modern counterparts, and the historically informed performances link audiences to a rich and vital past. The 16-member orchestra performing at Linfield includes trumpet, harpsichord, recorder, oboe, violin, viola, violoncello and contrabass.
Emerging in the early 1980s as a grass-roots cooperative of musicians, the Portland Baroque Orchestra is now within the ranks of the best baroque orchestras in North America and Europe. It is the fourth largest period-instrument ensemble in the nation, attracting musicians and guest conductors from around the world and winning international acclaim from audiences and critics.
Linfield’s “Joyful Noise” concert will feature works by Johann Sebastian Bach, including his much loved Brandenburg Concerto No. 2. The concert will also include music by Unico Wilhelm van Wassenaer and Georg Philipp Telemann, the most prolific composer in the history of classical music, with 800 compositions to his credit.
“Portland Baroque is made up of some truly exceptional musicians, wrote Eugene’s Register-Guard of the ensemble’s debut performances at the Oregon Bach Festival. “Artful shaping of melodies and the musicians’ acute sensitivity to one another made for very expressive playing.”
“The music ha[s] an intimacy often lost on modern instruments,” wrote The Oregonian.
Featured soloists include guest director Alexander Weimann on harpsichord, Barry Bauguess on baroque trumpet and Gonzalo Ruiz on oboe.
Weimann has traveled the world as a member of many ensembles and can be heard on some 100 CDs. He won worldwide acclaim for his 2001 release of Handel’s Gloria and his recording of the complete keyboard works by Alessandro Scarlatti was nominated for the Opus Prize as the best Canadian early-music recording. His Membra Jesu album won the Opus Prize and was nominated for a Juno Classic Award.
Barry Bauguess serves as principal trumpet with Apollo’s Fire, the Portland Baroque Orchestra, Atlanta Baroque Orchestra, Opera Lafayette, Indianapolis Baroque Orchestra and the Magnolia Baroque Festival Orchestra. He owns the Baroque Trumpet Shop in North Carolina and published Music for Natural Trumpet.
Gonzalo Ruiz has appeared as principal oboist and concerto soloist with leading period instrument groups in America and Europe, including Philharmonia Baroque, the English Concert and Sonnerie. He was a prizewinner at the Bruges Early Music Competition in Belgium. He is also an expert in historical reed-making techniques, with more than two dozen pieces on permanent display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The concert is sponsored by Ronni Lacroute, Linfield College trustee.
General admission is $10, and Linfield students with ID are admitted free. Tickets will be sold at the door (cash or check only) and doors open at 7 p.m. Faculty and staff may purchase tickets early by calling Karen Gorman at x2217.
Learn more about the Portland Baroque Orchestra at www.pbo.org. For more concert information contact the Linfield Department of Music at 503-883-2275.