Wednesday, December 7, 12:00—1:00 PM
Location: Children’s Area
Join us with the Austin Baroque Orchestra as we commemorate the Christmas season with chamber music! There will be some French noëls (Christmas songs from the late 1600s arranged for instruments), a Mexican villancico possibly not performed since 1710, the original version of the beloved Coventry Carol, and—we’re in Texas, right?—a couple pieces from Spain about cowboys. We’ll talk about the music and our instruments between the pieces, and you’ll be able to look more closely at the instruments and ask questions at the end of the program.
In the midst of its eleventh concert season, the Austin Baroque Orchestra & Chorus seeks to immerse its audiences in the sound world of the past by performing high-quality music from 1500-1820 using replicas of period instruments and performance techniques from the past. We think outside of the box, going beyond Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, and Mozart and instead choosing to focus upon the beautiful music of southern Europe (Spain, Portugal, Italy, France) and colonial-era Latin America. We have performed many long-forgotten (and sometimes long-lost) works composed south of the Rio Grande, sometimes for the first time in centuries. It is our goal to not only entertain our audiences but also share with them the various ways in which listeners in the past experienced and understood the music we perform today, some three or four centuries later.