'Stylus Phantasticus' - Buxtehude, Erlebach, Schmelzer, and Krieger

Barefoot Chamber Concerts ("an enterprise noted for both its quality and informality" - San Francisco Classical Voice) presents really good music in the right acoustic and without the formality of most classical music events.

Barefoot's March concert features the legendary "Stylus Phantasticus", music in a category all its own. It is said that Froberger took this wild style with him from St. Mark's Venice (where it originated in the music of Merulo and Frescobaldi) to Germany. The highly dramatic idiom caught on fast there, and a contemporary describes it thus: "The fantastic style is especially suited to instruments. It is the most free and unrestrained method of composing, it is bound to nothing, neither to any words nor to a melodic subject, it was instituted to display genius and to teach the hidden design of harmony and the ingenious composition of harmonic phrases and fugues."

Tonight's program, performed by Bay Area virtuosi David Wilson (violin), Lynn Tetenbaum (viola da gamba), and Katherine Heater (harpsichord), features an artisanally curated sampling of this captivating idiom, with composers including Buxtehude, Erlebach, Krieger, and Schmelzer. Unusally, this music leaves the bass part to the harpsichord, while the viola da gamba and violin play equal roles in the trio sonata texture. The program includes several breathtaking Buxtehude trios, and an Erlebach suite that blends in elements of the French dance suite. Well-known to Barefoot audiences, these players rank amongst the world's finest interpreters of 17th-century German music. The Swedenborgian church is the perfect acoustic for this concert, and there will be snax!