The Sackville Festival of Early Music returns this week with four concerts featuring music from the Renaissance and Baroque periods.
The festival runs Oct. 2 to 7, with three concerts at Mount Allison’s Brunton Auditorium and a final performance Wednesday at Cranewood on Main.
This will be Adam Dillon’s first festival as artistic and managing director.
“Early music generally is music that was composed before 1800,” Dillon said. “It can be, you know, sort of casually called classical music, but it’s really what came before classical music when the modern way that composers and musicians think about music hadn’t really been invented yet.”
Early music includes the Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque periods and often uses predecessors of modern instruments. Dillon said musicians have instruments and sheet music to work from, but no recordings to tell them how the music originally sounded.
“It’s live classical music but, like, with a fresh take,” Dillon said.
Dillon got into early music while studying trombone as an undergraduate. He was asked to play in a Baroque orchestra concert that needed a sackbut, a Renaissance predecessor to the modern trombone.
“I loved the repertoire. I loved learning about the earlier style and different nuances, and it just completely was a rabbit hole for me,” Dillon said. “I fell in love and it led me to have a career focused around it.”
Dillon previously performed at the Sackville festival in 2017. This is his first year leading it.
He said he wants to continue serving longtime audiences while bringing musicians and ensembles to Sackville that people in the region might not otherwise get a chance to see.
There is no single theme for this year’s concerts. Dillon said one focus this year is Canadian musicians and performers who have trained in Canada. Some are bringing their own programs to Sackville and will also join other musicians for performances during the festival.
Montreal’s Ensemble Spinoza opens the festival Friday at 7:30 p.m. with Echoes of Lübeck at Brunton Auditorium. Noémy Gagnon-Lafrenais, Christophe Gauthier and Margaret Little will perform on violin, organ and harpsichord, and viola da gamba.
Soprano Paulina Francisco joins the musicians Saturday for Deutsche Arien, featuring music by Handel and Bach. On Sunday, Francisco performs with Toronto-based lutenist Lucas Harris in Sweet Silent Thought, a program of English Renaissance lute songs.
Harris will stay in Sackville for the final performance Oct. 7, when he joins Mount Allison voice students for Divine Dowland at Cranewood on Main.
Visiting musicians will also work with Mount Allison music students during the festival. Dillon described the relationship between the festival and the university’s music students as “enormously mutually beneficial.”
Dillon said Sackville’s size also works in the festival’s favour.
“Being in a small, connected town like this is really helpful for our audience,” he said, referring to connections among students, faculty, staff, retired faculty and community members.
“It’s like a 10-minute walk to everywhere in the town,” Dillon said. “It’s a connectivity that similar festivals in large cities don’t have and they don’t benefit from the intimacy of.”
The Sackville Festival of Early Music was founded in 2004 and established its permanent home in Sackville in 2007.
Ticket information and the full festival schedule are available through the Sackville Festival of Early Music website.
