Artistic Director Adam Dillon on this year’s lineup and what makes early music worth a listen
The Sackville Festival of Early Music will return for its 19th year Oct. 2 to 7 at Brunton Auditorium, with an additional concert at Cranewood on Main. Artistic and managing director Adam Dillion said in an interview with The Argosy, “it is a real celebration this year of Canadian early music performers.”
Central to the festival is the concept of historically informed performance. “The historical performance movement began in the early to mid-20th century,” Dillon said. “As musicologists and performers began playing music from the Renaissance through the Baroque and Medieval period on recreations of historical period instruments.”
Dillon noted performers also study “contemporaneous documents of what that music may have sounded like.” Dillion said the goal is to “capture that musical spirit and aesthetic to the best of our research ability using some established methodologies to present concerts in a way we think they would have sounded.”
The student base sets the festival apart from other classical music events more broadly. “Most classical music audiences typically err on the side of an older audience. We’re in a good spot that we do have a lot of students attending.” Dillion said the next goal is to bring that same energy in from outside Sackville.
The festival opens with Echoes of Lűbeck, which will feature a selection of Buxtehude’s trio sonatas performed by Ensemble Spinoza. It is the concert Dillion said he is most looking forward to. “This is really like dazzling, exciting music that has unexpected twists and turns,” Dillion said. “It’s from this transitional musical period where they hadn’t quite figured out the definitions of the style just yet.”
Saturday Oct. 3 brings Deutsche Arien, pairing Handel’s Nine German Arias with Bach’s sonatas for the viola da gamba, and featuring “more familiar composers for the general public,” Dillion said. The weekend closes on Sunday, Oct. 4, with Sweet Silent Thought, a lute program “showcasing the intimate chamber repertoire of the English Renaissance.” The festival then extends into the following week with Divine Dowland and a coffee concert on Wednesday, Oct. 7 at Cranewood on Main.
When asked how he decides what to program each year, Dillon said the process starts long before audiences ever see a lineup. “Typically the programming brainstorming happens two, three years out,” Dillion said. Adding that the festival’s relationship with the community shapes pragmatic programming choices, Dillion said that “this is a mutually beneficial relationship between the music school at Mount Allison as well.”
For all the historical rigor behind these performances, Dillon is equally as focused on who is actually in the seats. The festival’s core audience remains rooted in the Mt.A community, drawing in current students, staff, and faculty alongside a “really dedicated core audience of early music lovers through the greater Amherst-Moncton corridor.” “Everyone wants to see a packed house, and if that can include more of the local and regional community, that’s what our goal is, bringing in more people from Amherst, more people from Moncton, and using the festival as a gathering place.”
To anyone hesitant that early music is not for them, Dillon’s answer is simple: come find out! For one week in October, some of the country’s finest early music performers will take to the stage in Sackville – performers “who decided to hone their musical talents into a particular specialty, and are going to present that in a way that only they can do.” Tickets for students are free, and all you have to do is show up.
Find out more about the festival at this link: https://sackvilleearlymusic.com/about