Guilford, Vt. – Friends of Music at Guilford, now in its 50th Anniversary Season, presents the second of three programs featuring Bolivian Baroque music from an archive of nearly 13,000 pages of recently collected manuscripts. The “Barroco Boliviano” concert begins at 4:00 p.m. on Saturday, February 20, in the sanctuary of Guilford Community Church, just a mile south on Rt. 5 from Exit 1 off I-91 in Brattleboro.
This treasure trove of Baroque-era manuscripts was a sort of Holy Grail for musicologist Fr. Piotr Nawrot, a native of Poland who arrived in Bolivia in the early 1990s after spending a few years in Guatemala. He traveled the Bolivian countryside seeking out church elders with carefully hidden or, in some cases, unfortunately neglected materials first composed and performed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the Spaniards took over that area of the Inca Empire, and then forgotten when the Spanish colonial period ended in the early 19th century. Fr. Nawrot has spent many years preparing a significant amount of this music for publication and performance by a new generation of musicians, both in Bolivia and around the world.
Friends of Music learned of this special musical reclamation project when administrative director Joy Wallens-Penford saw a CBS Sunday Morning segment in 2007. Journalist Bob Simon was floating down a river in Bolivia to find Fr. Nawrot and learn about his special mission. “This is so Friends of Music!” was her response to the story, which highlighted an annual music festival founded by Nawrot to showcase performances by native Bolivians and visiting ensembles such as the British group Florilegium. When she learned a bit later that Florilegium doesn’t tour in the States, but could be enticed to come for a prohibitively high fee, she was sent right to the source. Email correspondence with Fr. Nawrot led to acquisition of a carton of assorted music for New England-based musicians to perform.
The selected works featured in “Barroco Boliviano” include trio sonatas as well as solo or duo works for soprano and baritone with continuo accompaniment. Performers include local specialists in Early Music performanc
e: Peggy Spencer and Michelle Liechti, violins, Pedro Pereira, cello, and Gordon Jones, harpsichord. Special guest artists include the In Stile Moderno duo from Boston: Agnes Coakley, soprano, and Nathaniel Cox, theorbo; and baritone Rami Martinez from Mexico City, who has been performing Spanish American Baroque music there for the past three years with his Favola in Musica ensemble. Martinez has also arranged some of the materials for this performance.
The concert is followed by a hearty teatime reception with a warming soup and both sweet and savory treats. Admission at the door is $10, with a $50 patron ticket option that includes a CD recording of the performance.
Guilford Community Church is at 38 Church Dr. in Guilford. From Rt. 5, a few houses past the County Store, take a left into Bee Barn Rd. and turn left again into Church Dr. The church is handicap-accessible.
Contact the Friends of Music office for further information, 802-254-3600 or office@fomag.org.
