Baroque superstar Monica Huggett leads Nashville ensemble's historically informed performance

If you are not already acquainted with Belle Meade Baroque, don't let their name's "local color" fool you into picturing a provincial gang of spirited amateurs. The group's roster includes some of the area's top specialists in 18th century music, and a true superstar of the international early music scene—Baroque violinist Monica Huggett—will lead their season-finale concert of familiar and lesser-known works by Bach, Vivaldi and Geminiani.

Belle Meade Baroque aims for historically accurate presentation, using authentic period instruments and drawing on recent scholarship about tempo, tuning and musical expression. In a feature on the upcoming concert with Huggett, Early Music America lauds the ensemble's establishment of "cutting-edge historical performance" here in Music City.

Aficionados of historically informed Baroque performance will likely find Huggett represented in their music collections. Her dozens of recording credits include service as concertmaster of the English Concert, the Academy of Ancient Music and the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra as well as her own highly regarded work as conductor and soloist.

A violinist from age 6 and a Royal Academy student at 16, Huggett has said that she grew up envying the excitement surrounding rock musicians like Eric Clapton. She finally found her own kind of excitement when she discovered the Baroque violin as a student, and the Juilliard Journal recently described her as enjoying "something of a rock-star status in the early music world." Take that, Slowhand!

Working in her native London in the '70s and then with Ton Koopman in Amsterdam in the '80s, she was at the center of the emerging early-music movement from the beginning of her professional career. Today, Huggett is artistic director of Baroque orchestras in Ireland and Portland, and she is about to take the helm of the newly established historical performance program at Juilliard.

Belle Meade Baroque began informally in 2003 when oboist George Riordan and his wife violinist Karen Clarke invited organist-conductor Murray Somerville for a "Baroque jam session." Both men had recently arrived in Tennessee: Riordan to become dean of MTSU's school of music, Somerville to become musical director at St. George's Episcopal Church. Plans for a trio performance escalated to include some members of the Nashville Symphony and other area early-music specialists, and Belle Meade Baroque eventually emerged as a nonprofit organization with Somerville as artistic director and Clarke as concertmaster.

Somerville came to Nashville after 12 years as university organist and choirmaster at Harvard, where he also founded one of America's few undergraduate Baroque orchestras. He led the Harvard University Choir on well-received recordings and European tours, and his own organ recordings have been called "incomparable" by the American Record Guide. Somerville was a student of the famous organist and Bach scholar Karl Richter, and he has also directed the Winter Park Bach Festival.

Riordan has performed with numerous other early-music ensembles and with such standout instrumentalists as Jaap Schroeder. He and Clarke, now on faculty at the Blair School of Music, co-founded the ensemble Baroque Southeast at Florida State University. They are both currently members of the Atlanta Baroque Orchestra, where Clarke also serves as concertmaster.

Sunday's program includes J.S. Bach's Third Orchestral Suite in a strings-only version, giving a great example of how research can transform our understanding of well-known music. Bach scholar Joshua Rifkin recently proposed that the original version would not have included the trumpet, oboe and timpani parts usually used today, but that Bach added them for a later performance. Don't worry—the suite's famous Air (which is not really played on the G-string, by the way) never had brass and winds added, so that movement shouldn't sound too different from what we're accustomed to. Huggett's recent CD of all four Bach Orchestral Suites incorporates other such scholarly emendations; it will be available at the concert for the first time in the U.S.

The concert will include Spring from Antonio Vivaldi's ever-popular Four Seasons, along with two more of Vivaldi's several hundred concertos. Also featured is a work by Francesco Geminiani, a contemporary of Bach and Vivaldi and a follower of Arcangelo Corelli. He is known today not only as a composer, but also as the author of several musical treatises that provide important information about Baroque performance practices.

For anyone unfamiliar with period-instrument performance, this is a great chance to discover the light and elegant sound it can bring to this repertoire. Partisans of historically informed performance practice will just want to come and celebrate Belle Meade Baroque's fifth year of helping to put Nashville on the early-music map.

Email arts@nashvillescene.com.