Playlists

Music Festivals are one of the many highlights of the summer season, and there are wonderful longstanding festivals that feature baroque and early music. They attract performers and ensembles from all over the world so more people can hear interesting music played on unusual instruments. This weekend on Sunday Baroque you’ll get a sample of some of the musicians being featured at upcoming early music festivals.

As the saying goes, “When in Rome, do as the Romans do …” Some people even adopt a new NAME to fit in with the locals! English composer Henry Butler and Italian born musician Giovanni Battista Lulli are just two who changed their names to match their adopted homes. You’ll hear some of their music this weekend on Sunday Baroque.

On this Memorial Day weekend, Sunday Baroque will offer music of remembrance and reflection, including selections from a hauntingly beautiful and ancient Requiem Mass included on a recently released recording.

Many musicians have been immortalized by their fellow creative artists in other disciplines with poems, statues and paintings. British portrait master Thomas Gainsborough used some of his musician friends as subjects and Robert Browning wrote a poem about an 18th c. Venetian musician. Sunday Baroque will feature their music, and their stories.

International Museum Day is celebrated annually on May 18th, and Sunday Baroque will present some outstanding ensembles that regularly perform in museums, from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts to the Metropolitan Museum to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

However you plan to spend Mother’s Day, Sunday Baroque will provide the perfect soundtrack featuring performances by some musically talented moms and their offspring playing baroque and early music.

Whether you like to dig in and get your hands dirty in the garden, or prefer to leave that work to someone else, you can enjoy a flourishing MUSICAL garden on Sunday Baroque. Highlights include Spanish choral music about an enclosed garden, and an instrumental suite about the four elements of Earth, Air, Fire and Water.

England’s River Thames is much cleaner today than it was in centuries past, when it doubled as a sewer line. It certainly changes how we think of King George’s cruise on the Thames with George Frideric Handel and his musicians performing their Water Music! Sunday Baroque features a sparklingly clean performance of some of Handel’s Water Music in honor of Earth Day.

The annual tax deadline has passed, and Sunday Baroque will help you celebrate and relax with a look at baroque composers and their money. Francesco Geminiani, for example, loved the finer things in life and lived way beyond his means, while Michael Praetorius saved enough to leave money in his will to start a charitable organization.

William Shakespeare was born in April 1564, only a few years before the baroque era began. Music played a significant role in Shakespeare’s plays, whether to set a mood or further the story. Sunday Baroque celebrates Shakespeare and some of the music his work inspired over the centuries.