Musicians who love baroque music — a period spanning roughly 1600 to Johann Sebastian Bach’s death in 1750 — really love it. They study it in depth, perform it exclusively, and insist on historical singing techniques and period instruments — things like lutes, flauto traversos made of wood and violins strung with animal gut.
Audiences usually catch these highly specialized performances in major cities such as Boston, New York City, San Francisco and Montréal. That makes the Burlington Baroque Festival a remarkable affair. Now in its second year, the event opens on Thursday, September 18, with four concerts in four days by international experts, at the College Street Congregational Church. Eric Milnes leads the festival’s 54 performers, who include his Granby, Québec-based baroque ensemble L’Harmonie des saisons and the Burlington Baroque Festival Singers — a combination of singers from Vermont and L’Harmonie.
Milnes, a harpsichordist and organist, and his wife Mélisande Corriveau, a cellist and violist da gamba, are music director and artistic director, respectively, of L’Harmonie, which they founded in 2010. Milnes began coming to Burlington in 2020 for additional gigs as director of the College Street Congregational choir and later the Vermont Choral Union. From the start, he envisioned a baroque festival in the Queen City; that came to pass last year in an inaugural fest that delighted sold-out audiences.
Baroque music tends to have a driving rhythm and, rather like the churches of the same era, a fair amount of ornamentation. It generally focuses on a melody with the harmony led by a continuo — a through line played, in the case of L’Harmonie, by Milnes on the harpsichord.
This year’s music ranges from George Frideric Handel’s and Henry Purcell’s festive odes honoring Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of music, to Antonio Vivaldi’s ever-popular The Four Seasons to a concert of lesser-known French music written for King Louis XIV.
Milnes, who has a master’s degree in music from the Juilliard School and decades of experience with baroque ensembles around the world, puts his extensive historical knowledge about the works into program notes rather than addressing audiences during performances. By phone, however, his enthusiasm for the era was evident.
The opening concert, titled “Welcome to All the Pleasures!,” focuses on the two colossi of English baroque music: Purcell, a Londoner all his life, and Handel, who “is of course the greatest non-English English composer ever,” Milnes quipped. Born in Germany, Handel spent two-thirds of his life in London and wrote some of his most famous music there, including Messiah.
Commissions for Saint Cecilia Day abounded in the baroque era, Milnes added. “If we view music as a spiritual state, as I do, then Saint Cecilia … represents the miracle that there is music at all.”
While Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, the focus of the second concert, may sound familiar to many, Milnes’ twist is to put a different solo violinist on each concerto, highlighting L’Harmonie’s many highly skilled musicians.
The sound of the work played on gut-strung instruments may also be new to audiences. “The timbre, the transparency, the clarity of the sound is strikingly different” from modern metal or synthetic strings, Milnes said. “It’s less loud but more delicate and more dramatically expressive.”
Of the third concert, “Bach: The Cantor of Leipzig,” which features two of the composer’s 200-plus known cantatas, Milnes declared, “We do Bach the way he did: with eight singers and not 30 of them.
“There were no church choruses or choirs in Lutheran Germany,” he explained. “This notion of choirs singing Bach was invented in the 1870s” to imitate the popularity and commercial viability of Handel’s large oratorios, he said.
“Music took people out of the perceivedhorrors of everyday life.”
Eric Milnes
Festival soprano Cathy Ellis Stadecker, a trademark lawyer and partner at Downs Rachlin Martin in Burlington, is president of the Burlington Baroque Festival board. She helped Milnes found the festival, including locating Vermonters to sing with the group. She’s performed professionally in New York, Boston, San Francisco and England and is a member of both the Vermont Choral Union and L’Harmonie.
“It’s really exciting to do [baroque music] with someone who’s at the level that Eric is at and with these really intense musicians,” Stadecker said. “He has such an energy that he brings and a standard that makes you want to do it the best that you can. It’s really been amazing that he’s located here now.”
Violinist Scott Metcalfe, who has played with Milnes for 40 years, including at last year’s festival, agrees. “The quality [of the Burlington Baroque Festival] is exceptionally high. Eric is such an asset; it’s tremendous that someone of his abilities and inspiration has wound up in Burlington. And he just loves to do music, to do performances. That’s the only reason we’re there. It’s not glitzy.”
Metcalfe, the son of late doyens of early music in Burlington — harpsichordist Liz and conductor-scholar Bill Metcalfe — artistic-directs Blue Heron, a Boston vocal ensemble specializing in Renaissance and medieval music. He will travel back from a fall residency at the Alamire Foundation in Belgium, where he is working on a new edition of the songs of a 15th-century composer, to play in Burlington Baroque.
Metcalfe will serve as concertmaster on the last two concerts, including the fourth, “The Splendor of Versailles!,” which features his favorite: French baroque. Of all the strains of baroque, Metcalfe opined, French “requires the most specialized stylistic understanding in order to be effective. It’s filled with ornaments and all sorts of nuance that is not notated. If you don’t do all that stuff, the music loses its special beauty.”
The performance of such rarified music — especially that of the Sun King’s, aka King Louis XIV, extravagant Versailles court — evokes a stark contrast with Burlington’s current struggles with homelessness and addiction.
But for Milnes, the music is a way of coping for everyone. “Music took people out of the perceived horrors of everyday life then,” just as it does now, he said. “I personally believe it holds one of the most important places in humanity’s existence. If the life on the street or the country or the world continues to be horrifying to many, then maybe the music can provide a counterweight.”
Burlington Baroque Festival, Thursday to Sunday, September 18 to 21, College Street Congregational Church in Burlington. $12.57-87.63; free for children under 18. burlingtonbaroque.org
The original print version of this article was headlined “If It Ain’t Baroque | The Burlington Baroque Festival returns for its second year”
This article appears in Sep 10-16 2025.
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