In a flashback to a bygone era, authentic period instruments from the 1700s will be featured in an upcoming concert, “The Pearl in the Oyster: Baroque Masterpieces,” this Saturday at 3 p.m. at the North Fork Arts Center in Greenport. The concert will be given by the Long Island Baroque Ensemble (LIBE).
The musicians slated to perform are “exceptional,” in the words of LIBE’s Artistic Director Margo Andrea, a mezzo soprano and part-time Greenport resident who will be performing on Saturday. “Four out of the seven play with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s (in New York City). They are performing at Carnegie Hall on Friday and are driving to Greenport to play on Saturday,” she says. The roster includes Krista Bennion Feeney, concert master of the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, who will be performing with her Italian violin made in the 1770s.
LIBE was started 55 years ago by two professional musicians who wanted to bring historic performance out of the city to Long Island. Many performances have taken place all over the Island since then, Andrea relates. “We’ve performed at Planting Fields Arboretum, at Coe Hall, at the Frick Estate (now the Nassau County Museum of Art), at Brookwood Hall in Islip … all over. They did a performance at the Montauk Lighthouse in the late1970s or early 1980s,” she continues. “It was always the intention to bring great work right into Long Islanders’ backyards.”
LIBE’s mission is to present high-quality concerts of the Renaissance, Baroque and early Classical periods using original instruments and historic tunings to demonstrate the era’s relation to the present.
“The instruments have no steel strings, but gut strings, and the playing technique is a little different,” says Andrea. “The way the instrument resonates is a warmer sound, completely different than a modern instrument,” she says. “[The sound] doesn’t carry in a large hall; it is suited to more intimate spaces.”
Andrea notes that the instruments are quite distinctive looking as well. “That’s why Renaissance painters painted them; they are all beautiful objects.”
But there’s another reason this concert may be of interest to audiences. LIBE was awarded a grant by the National Endowment for the Arts initiative “Celebrating America 250: Arts Projects Honoring the National Garden of American Heroes,” in anticipation of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence next year.
As part of the project, LIBE will perform music from the libraries of three famous Americans: Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Sojourner Truth. Saturday’s concert is the first of the three and will honor Thomas Jefferson’s contributions to music.
“He has a library of music that is very important,” says Andrea. “He was a violinist who taught his daughter how to play the violin. He would have played some of the pieces that we are playing on Saturday. The Bach, the Vivaldi, the Handel — they were all in his collection.”
The remaining two concerts will be performed in December and next spring. Until then, don’t pass up your chance to enjoy LIBE’s Greenport performance, which runs just over an hour. Tickets are $35 and may be accessed here.
