Now in its 18th year, the Pacific Baroque Festival will be treating audiences to the energetic experience of live classical music this month. This year, the festival will be honouring 350 years since the passing of influential composer Heinrich Schütz, across five days of live performances.
Pacific Baroque Festival artistic director Marc Destrubé is a seasoned violinist leading the Pacific Baroque Festival Ensemble; he says that the goal of the festival is to showcase lesser-heard classical music.
“The motto of the festival has kind of over the years become ‘Music that deserves to be heard’ because we’ve realized there’s a great deal of really fantastic music that doesn’t get heard so much,” says Destrubé. “Part of it is that the whole legacy of the 19th century, and a little bit before, has left this giant shadow, and we tend to not be aware of what lies behind the shadow, and sometimes within it. It was a very, very rich time; it was a time of upheaval in Europe, and composers could be actually very adventurous, they weren’t stuck to strict models in how they wrote music.”
Destrubé, 66, has been playing violin since he was nine years old. An avid performer and music lover, Destrubé enjoys its capacity to convey complex emotions beyond language.
“I think music has the unique ability to express different emotions at the same time; maybe poetry is the only other art that has come near to that, so I just love the ability to use music as a vehicle for communicating with others,” he says. “Music, even if it has no text, is always saying something, so I very much enjoy that aspect.”
Destrubé also recognizes that music brings people together, which is something we’ve been sorely lacking over the past couple of years.
“Music is a social activity. It brings the audience and the musicians together for a shared experience, and I think especially after the pandemic we’ve been deprived of that,” he says. “I think we’ve all become very aware of how important that is in our lives. We want to have social community and shared experiences, and music is a wonderful way of creating that opportunity for us, so I love being a part of that.”
Baroque music differs from other classical music in its length and intricacy, and Destrubé believes its unexpectedly similar characteristics to contemporary music are a great way for newcomers to get into the genre.
“I think baroque music in many ways is more approachable for listeners who aren’t used to hearing classical music, because the pieces tend to be short, and they often follow similar forms to pop music,” he says. “A great deal of popular music has that similar juxtaposition of a bass line and then one or two vocal lines, and that’s inherent in a great deal of baroque music as well.”
Destrubé thinks the festival is a great opportunity for people to experience music across time and space while immersed in the visceral intimacy that only live performance can bestow.
“I think a festival is like going to a sweets fair—you can sample all the different tastes and flavours from a given place or time,” he says. “It’s an opportunity to immerse oneself in a particular style and time, and actually get to know it much more intimately than one might just by hearing a piece on the radio, or putting on a CD. What I hope people might get out of it is becoming familiar with a whole world of music that they might not have known before.”
Pacific Baroque Festival
Various times, Wednesday, March 16 to Sunday, March 20
Various prices, various venues
pacbaroque.com