Musica Stellarum: The Art of the Viola da Gamba ft. Caroline Nicolas, Kevin Payne, and Dr. Joyce Wei-Jo Chen

Musica Stellarum: The Art of the Viola da Gamba brings together three acclaimed early-music performers for a celebration of one of the Baroque era’s most expressive and virtuosic instruments. Viola da gambist Caroline Nicolas and lutenist/theorbist Kevin Payne join harpsichordist Dr. Joyce Wei-Jo Chen for three Oregon performances, bringing music from Nicolas’s recording project into the distinctive settings of the University of Oregon’s Berwick Hall, Mount Angel Abbey Church, and the Chapel of Christ the Teacher at the University of Portland.

At the heart of the program are two towering masters of the French viol: Marin Marais and Antoine Forqueray. Their contrasting styles were famously characterized in the eighteenth century as Marais playing “like an angel” and Forqueray “like the devil.” From Marais’s elegance, refinement, and imagination to Forqueray’s fiery virtuosity, the program reveals the extraordinary expressive range of the viola da gamba. Alongside these French masterpieces, J. S. Bach’s Sonata in G major for viola da gamba and harpsichord transforms the viol into an equal partner in an intricate musical conversation.

Together, Nicolas, Payne, and Chen bring some of the finest music written for the viola da gamba to Oregon—music by turns intimate, elegant, dazzling, and dramatic, heard across three very different spaces and acoustic worlds.

Caroline Nicolas, viola da gamba Kevin Payne, theorbo Dr. Joyce Wei-Jo Chen, harpsichord