Monica Huggett and PBO

Tonight, public television OPB-TV broadcast a piece on Monica Huggett and her leadership of the Portland Baroque Orchestra. Click here to enjoy it for yourself! She is doing Vivaldi, but it is her Bach that I most remember.

I think I first heard Huggett and her violin when I used to spend hours and hours in my darkroom in Venice Beach with KPFK and KCRW music programs playing almost around the clock. At the time, there was great interest in interpreting 17th and 18th century music in a more "authentic" manner using period instruments, and some of the DJs at those stations were all over the stuff. The difference in sound, compared with the more usual contemporary arrangements and instrumentation, was astonishing, and very obvious even to a non-musician like myself. Ton Koopman of the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra was a leader in this movement -- as was Monica Huggett, and others whose names escape me at the moment. Huggett's personal violin, I have heard, is an Italian Amati made in the 1600s. Monica is English, absolutely world class and a tremendous gift to us to have as a neighbor in Portland.