Artifice: "Resonance of Salzburg: Biber, Vilsmayr, Muffat"

San Francisco Early Music Society: Period Ensemble in Concert

Even before Mozart, the city's most famous son, was born, the narrow streets of Salzburg -- not to mention its baroque churches and glittering salons -- were filled with sublime music. During the late-17th and early-18th centuries, Salzburg was home to such musical luminaries as Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber, Johann Joseph Vilsmayr and Georg Muffat, composers whose daring sonatas and elegant concerti still resonate as some of the era's finest string music. Now the San Francisco Early Music Society celebrates this extraordinary time and place with their latest concert, as the ensemble Artifice performs "Salzburg: Biber, Vilsmayr, Muffat". Let these masters of period instruments, including such treats as a theorbo (imagine a lute of near-mythic proportions), whisk you off to a place and period of extraordinary magic at St John's Presbyterian Church in Berkeley.