On Monday evening, March 24, the early-music ensemble Quicksilver brought a program described as “extravagant new music” to the Bay Area. Technically, this music was “new” a long time ago, at the start of the 17th century. Yet it still feels new in 2025.
The concert at First Congregational Church of Berkely didn’t consist of the sort of Baroque pieces that feature on easy-listening playlists. Rather, the performance was a distinctly outside-the-box offering, unpredictable and passionate, full of color and surprise — a feast for the ears.
At the turn of the 17th century, Italian music had long been dominated by the traditional church style — think of the works of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, who is celebrating his 500th birthday this year: disciplined, clear, predictable, and eminently beautiful. But this new music — self-labeled variously as stile moderno or stile fantastico (in a modern or fantastic style) — burst free of that tradition, following the lead of Claudio Monteverdi with his radically expressive and often dissonant madrigals.
None of the 12 composers highlighted on Quicksilver’s program is a household name today, but they were well known in their time. Giovanni Legrenzi, a kid from the country, made it big as the well-paid director of music at the Basilica San Marco in Venice. Francesco Cavalli was an international star thanks to his dozens of operas and dazzling instrumental works, daringly called “sonatas” — that is, “sounded” music (as opposed to sung music).
This modern style spread across Italy and northward, to the court of the Holy Roman Emperor in Vienna and even to Lübeck on the cold Baltic Sea, where Dieterich Buxtehude invented such gripping organ fantasies that a young J.S. Bach is said to have walked over 200 miles to hear the master perform.
Monday’s concert covered all of this terrain and more. “Quicksilver” is another name for the element mercury — the only metal that is liquid at room temperature. Pour it on a table, and the spherical droplets, shining and toxic, dash about in all directions, glistening and nearly uncontrollable, much like the Roman god Mercury — the eloquent, speedy messenger of the heavens and also a trickster.
The ensemble’s performance at First Church captivated with patterns of lights and darks, appearances and vanishings. The group masterfully captured the surprise element of this music, which, like the modernism of the 20th century, seems to revel in suddenness and novelty. In the group’s playing, an emotion would swell up for a minute or two, only to change swiftly. As at an Italian dinner party, everyone had something to say. Conversation proceeded in a swirl of notes, a flurry of sound, a sudden dipping down into quiet melancholy, and then an elegant handoff to another player.
Quicksilver’s directors are also its violinists: Robert Mealy, head of Juilliard’s historical performance program, and Julie Andrijeski, who holds a similar title at Cleveland’s Case Western Reserve University. Joining them were Avi Stein on harpsichord and organ, David Morris on viola da gamba, and John Lenti on theorbo (the long-necked version of the lute).
Listening to this little-known music, one could hear where the great instrumental works of later centuries were born, where the Classical-era composers learned how to write wordless scores that nonetheless project an enthralling story. From these theatrical sonatas came the string quartets of Haydn and the symphonies of Beethoven.
Monday’s elegant and enchanting performance, capping a West Coast tour for Quicksilver, was presented by the San Francisco Early Music Society (the gig had initially been scheduled for the ill-fated COVID era of January 2022). A splendid encore by the 17th-century Venetian Tarquinio Merula sent the audience home dancing, at least in spirit.
