This Saturday night, April 20 at 7:00 p.m. at All Saints Anglican Church, the Winnipeg Baroque Festival will be presenting the seventh concert in what has been so far an amazing week of performances.
Called Fidem in Fidibus or Faith in Fiddles, this concert will showcase Baroque chamber music from 17th-century Italy, Austria, and Germany.
The concert will also feature some of Winnipeg’s finest baroque string players. The ensemble consists of Momoko Matsumura on violin, Tatiana Friesen on violin and viola, Jennifer Thiessen on viola and viola d’amore, Nathaniel Froese on cello, Theresa Thordarson on keyboards, and John Himes on guitar.
The Fidem in Fidibus concert is the brainchild of Momoko Matsumura. As she explains, “I have been interested in historical, informed performance practice. I was by myself at first…but through the music community here in Winnipeg I found one by one these amazing people…and for this year’s baroque festival I decided to put this ensemble together with these wonderful musicians.”
The concert will have four pieces by the Bohemian-Austrian composer Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber. Says Matsumura, “Biber was one of the composers we really wanted to feature, so we picked up some of Biber’s music, and then we decided to explore composers who might have some connection to Biber.”
One of the composers who came out of this musical exploration was the composer and nun Isabella Leonarda. She was a composer who lived between 1620 and 1704 and spent her entire life in a convent in Novara, Italy. Tatiana Friesen has known about Leonarda’s music for a few years now. As she explains, “She’s a nun during a time where lots and lots of women were being pushed into convents basically…maybe with their consent, maybe not…often not. You had this musical rebellion actually going on where nuns were composing and singing and playing instruments that they were not actually allowed to be playing.”[As dictated by the church hierarchy] The ensemble will be playing some of her music at this concert.
Other composers' music that will be heard at the concert include Alessandro Piccinini, Marco Uccellini, and Johann Heinrich Schmelzer amongst others.
This is going to be a spectacular concert with these six great baroque specialists. There will be the intimacy a chamber music setting has to offer combined with the expansiveness that the organ and sanctuary at All Saints Anglican provides. “I think Saturday night will be a really remarkable, acoustical experience because of the church and the organ. We are all used to playing in very small spaces when we are practicing but All Saints which has been so lovely to let us rehearse there and play there…I’ll be playing the pipe organ for parts of it, and it’s just like a sound bath…it’s an incredible experience in that regard,” states Thordarson.
Don’t miss out on this remarkable experience! The concert Fidem in Fidibus happens this Saturday night April 20, at 7:00 p.m. at All Saints Anglican Church. For details visit The Winnipeg Baroque Festival’s website.
