In the mad dash to make classical music more “marketable,” it seems every ensemble, large or small, is programming concerts with a thematic hook, like tracing the history of a specific instrument or the relationship between composer and patron.

Some of the ideas are a bit manufactured but others are genuinely intriguing, and well worth exploring.

Capella Intima is an early music ensemble that has used this method of grouping pieces together to create a narrative. As the founder of the ensemble, I’m always looking for ways to entice people to our concerts, but considering our repertoire, it can be a tough sell.

Capella Intima performs music that is rarely heard anywhere else — mostly sacred music from the early 17^th-century for a few solo voices, with continuo accompaniment.

My path to this repertoire was indirect to say the least.

For a number of years as an orchestral oboist, going to work meant putting on a tailcoat and heading to the concert hall to play a symphony by Mozart, Mahler or Brahms. It was when I began to sing tenor that I immersed myself in the world of early music, and realized how satisfying it could be to unearth forgotten treasures and share them with an engaged and curious audience.

The problem, of course, is that the audience tends to be small — sometimes very small. But I continue to present concerts of this sort, embracing the ideas that Bruce Haynes set out in his wonderful 2007 book, The End of Early Music, about the limiting nature of what we consider to be the canon.

There is a wealth of music worthy of performance from the early baroque, written by composers whose names have been seen only in the footnotes of history texts. I know this because I’ve heard it performed by adventurous groups from around the world, and distributed by equally adventurous record labels.

It was this excitement of discovery (or rediscovery) that led me to the baroque guitar, and the system of notation called alfabeto.

In the early decades of the 17^th century, the Spanish guitar displaced the lute as the favoured instrument for vocal accompaniment. Composers and publishers alike were eager to increase their sales to a wider audience with little musical training. To overcome this, they would provide a simple fingering chart for strummed chords identified by letters of the alphabet with each volume of arias published. This way, practically anyone could accompany the popular music of the day.

Accompanying oneself is probably the furthest point away from performing a Strauss tone poem with a hundred colleagues on stage, following a conductor’s every gesture. It really is a completely different musical world.

This early baroque repertoire is usually performed with a continuo group, but even that requires an element of following someone else’s lead. The freedom that comes from providing one’s own accompaniment isn’t something foreign to singer-songwriters today, but remains elusive to most classical performers.

Capella Intima will present a programme of these arias by Alessandro Grandi, Giovanni Felice Sances, and Claudio Monteverdi, (with a little Barbara Strozzi thrown in as well) in Toronto and Hamilton.

The Toronto concerts are on Nov. 17 at 3 p.m. in the chapel at Trinity-St Paul’s Centre, and at the same time on Nov. 18 at Kingston Rd United Church.

For all the details about Capella Intima and the concerts, click here.

Thanks to support from the Ontario Arts Council, Capella Intima will be able to present a larger-scale concert in March of 2013. I’m looking at early Roman oratorios —  probably ones by Luigi Rossi — with a few string instruments.

Here is the promo video for the premiere recording of Alessandro Grandi’s third volume of arias from 1626:

Bud Roach