Mince Pies and Panettone: Music on a New Year’s Day, the Carl Cherry Center for the Arts’ annual baroque concert, will be held Sunday, January 1st at 3 p.m. Join us for the Cherry Center’s annual New Year’s Day celebration featuring the Cherry Trio: Penny Hanna, Elizabeth Gaver and Michael Peterson. $25 at brownpapertickets.com.
The earthy and winsome English meet the sophisticated and witty Italians for an afternoon New Year’s Day concert. This year, harpsichordist Michael Peterson joins Elizabeth Gaver, violin, and Penny Hanna , viola da gamba, to present an assortment of styles from the 17th century featuring rarely heard, but still very tasty tunes from Jenkins, Hume, Lawes, Marini, and Vitali.
Derived from the Portuguese barroco, or “oddly shaped pearl,” the term “baroque” has been widely used since the nineteenth century to describe the period in Western European art music from about 1600 to 1750. Comparing some of music history’s greatest masterpieces to a misshapen pearl might seem strange to us today, but to the nineteenth century critics who applied the term, the music of Bach and Handel’s era sounded overly ornamented and exaggerated. Having long since shed its derogatory connotations, “baroque” is now simply a convenient catch-all for one of the richest and most diverse periods in music history.
The Carl Cherry Center for the Arts, Fourth and Guadalupe, Carmel. (831) 624-7491.