Berkeley festival packed with musical delights

When you’ve got dozens of performers and several centuries’ worth of music to get through in a week, as the organizers of the Berkeley Festival and Exhibition do, there’s nothing for it but to stack the concerts in tightly — two, three or even four a day.

In the evening, violinist Rachel Podger was the guest with the local ensemble Voices of Music for a program of concertos that lent remarkable zest to the works of Vivaldi and J.S. Bach.

[...] together, these were only a small sample of the lively exploration of Baroque, medieval and Renaissance music that continue to fill the churches and concert halls around the UC Berkeley campus.

If the repertoire on Thursday’s programs was more familiar than most, there was nothing remotely routine or expected about the Voices of Music concert in First Congregational Church.

The Fourth “Brandenburg” Concerto got a reading both urgent and winningly pastoral, and Vivaldi’s Violin Concerto in D, Op. 4, No. 11, elicited Podger’s most stylish and dramatically focused efforts of the evening.

Yet for sheer crowd-pleasing virtuosity, there was nothing on the program to rival van Proosdij’s daredevil race through Vivaldi’s Concerto in C for sopranino recorder.

Bezuidenhout, who joins Podger for a duo recital on Saturday, June 11, seemed intent on making his recital in St. Mark’s Episcopal Church a showcase for the capabilities of the often overlooked fortepiano.