Your Saturday Night Dessert

Tonight we feature baroque violinist Elizabeth Blumenstock, of (I believe) the SF Bay Area, in a group with which she often works, Voices of Music. Blumenstock is wonderful beyond belief, as a performer and as a teacher.

My fondest memory involving Ms. Blumenstock is from sometime in the mid-1980s at the Festival Institute at Round Top, in a masterclass taught onstage (students as well as teachers). The delightful thing about old instruments of a certain period is that they are in some ways musically interchangeable: a fine violinist has a great deal to teach an aspiring serious recorder player, about literature, period articulation and phrasing, matters of singing and dancing (the two basic idioms of music from about 1600 to 1750 or thereabouts)... in short, everything except the technique of playing the instrument. Ms. Blumenstock was (and doubtless still is) a superb teacher and a world-class performer. I was spellbound for well over an hour!

Here are your treats for the evening (all YouTube videos; I won't strain your RAM by putting them all here on the page):

• J. H. Schmelzer Sonata Quarta in D Major from Sonatae Unarum Fidium (1664)
  Elizabeth Blumenstock, Voices of Music, San Francisco
  

  We've visited Schmelzer before on this blog; if you don't remember him, Google him.
  

• Elizabeth Blumenstock talks about the baroque violin
  

  Ms. Blumenstock in her other master role.
  

• Tarquinio Merula: Ciaccona. Elizabeth Blumenstock, Voices of Music
  

  An earlier, more direct Italian baroque idiom, but no less revealing of violin technique (the Italians were nothing if not showy) and musical sensitivity (they had that, too).
  

My only regret is that I was unable to find Ms. Blumenstock's long-ago recording (1999?) of many short works by Nicola Matteis, another Italian very successful on the London music scene until his death in 1714(?). But that recording is itself "ancient music" even in my little collection; you'll just have to imagine it!

PS Please note the recorder-playing by Hanneke van Proosdij in the Voices of Music recordings listed above... and don't ever make a disparaging remark about recorder players again!