The Princeton Festival has been exploring some new performance genres this year, including Indian music and dance, and country music. The Festival presented an evening of Baroque music last Wednesday night with a high-level of playing and a bit of audience education from the musicians. The performance by the Festival Baroque Orchestra in Princeton Seminary’s Miller Chapel proved to be both entertaining and informative.

For Wednesday night’s performance, Princeton Festival Artistic Director Richard Tang Yuk assembled a chamber orchestra of young players, all with a connection to the renowned music school at Indiana University. Dr. Tang Yuk also cast himself in a rarely-seen role as continuo harpsichord player. The nine string players and one oboist in the Festival Baroque Orchestra focused their performance on works of 18th-century masters, as well as two lesser-known but equally as important composers. Concertmaster Juan Carlos Zamudio, together with Dr. Tang Yuk, transformed the performance into more of a lecture/recital with a brief discussion beforehand on Baroque performance practice, instruments, and tuning. These introductory remarks gave the audience some insight into the challenges of the music heard, as well as an appreciation for how well the players, who live throughout the United States and came together for this performance, presented a cohesive and well-executed program.

Composer Heinrich Biber is not one of the most well-known of the early Baroque, but this Austrian performer and composer was one of the most important creators of music for the violin of his time. Composers of this era often interpreted events in musical forms, including Biber’s Battaglia á 10 in D Major, a multi-movement piece depicting the action and atmosphere of a battlefield. Recreating the noise of battle in an ensemble without brass might seem like a challenge, but Biber’s eight-movement work used effects from the strings to replicate cannon fire, drums and trumpet calls. The string players of the Festival Baroque Orchestra followed concertmaster Mr. Zamudio well, playing with unified strokes as soldiers marched, and long melodic lines in reflective passages.

Throughout the concert, the upper string players reshuffled themselves into different combinations of players, creating a solid overall sound for Georg Muffat’s Florilegium Primum: Fasciculus I – a set of six dance movements introduced by an Overture. The Baroque Orchestra easily captured the energetic dotted rhythms and lilt of this late 17th-century work, as well as demonstrating well-executed ornaments from the upper strings.

The two undisputed powerhouses of the Baroque – Georg Friedrich Handel and Johann Sebastian Bach – were rooted in similar compositional techniques, but at the height of their careers, these two composers were writing very different music. Handel took the concerto form and expanded it to juxtapose not only soloists but also small ensembles of players against full orchestra, and Concerto Grosso, Op. 6, No. 10 was a consummate example of a mature 18th-century instrumental concerto. For this work, the strings of the Festival Baroque Orchestra were joined by oboist Sarah Huebsch, whose playing made a significant difference in the orchestral color.

The Baroque Orchestra easily executed the rhythms of the opening Overture, achieving a wide range of dynamics. The players also found the varied characters of the seven different movements, including the stateliness of an Allegro which reflected Handel’s choral writing, and the precise articulation of the faster movements. In a courtly Allegro, each violinist had a chance to take the lead.

In contrast, Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins featured soloists Mr. Zamudio and Reynaldo Patino in a complex battle of strings. Each half of the orchestra was uniform among its players, with the sequential passages well interpreted. Both Mr. Zamudio and Mr. Patino were confident players, with Mr. Patino a particularly decisive musician as each solo violinist answered the other. In the second movement Largo, Mr. Zamudio introduced the melody without vibrato, creating a more majestic effect answered by Mr. Patino. The Orchestra as a whole built intensity and dynamics well, providing graceful cadences. The third movement Allegro was marked by little motives traveling around the ensemble as the Orchestra controlled the busy activity, coming together to close the movement well.

The upper strings were featured in each of the four works on Wednesday night’s program, but no less key to the success of the concert were cellist Brady Lanier and double bassist David Casali. These two players provided consistent underpinning to the other instrumentalists, enabling the music to flow within a solid structure. A very sprightly and historically accurate playing of Johann Pachelbel’s Canon in D as an encore showed the ensemble’s ability to develop motives from short and dry phrases to long melodic lines, bringing the concert to a well-appreciated close.