Salish Sea Early Music Festival Presents Louis XIV Musicians

The Salish Sea Early Music Festival brings Louis XIV’s Musicians to Orcas Island. Canadian Viola da gambist Caroline Nicolas from New York City, baroque guitarist William Simms from Baltimore and artistic director and baroque flutist Jeffrey Cohan present works by the instrumentalist composers, both male and female, who were most admired by Louis XIV in France around 1700.

This program features music by prominent soloists, all composers, who frequently played for Louis XIV, including the king’s guitar instructor Robert De Visée and his Italian predecessor Francesco Corbetta, along with a favorite viola da gambist at the court, Marin Marais and his teacher Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe, as well as Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre, a young harpsichordist and one of the few famous female musicians of her time whose playing and compositions Louis deeply admired and subsidized. The program will include the earliest known French solo specifically for the transverse flute by the king’s court music librarian André Danican Philidor L’Aisné, which is not to be heard elsewhere as Jeffrey Cohan discovered it in a relatively unknown and as yet unpublished manuscript in the Library of Congress, alongside solos performed by Caroline Nicolas and William Simms for viola da gamba and guitar.