Jason Moy began Ars Musica Chicago’s Friday-night recital, “Angels and Demons,” with a warning – of sorts. Baroque Italian musical life, he noted, was full of characters: schemers, libertines, religious zealots, assassins and virtuosi with sharp elbows. The remarks set the tone for a surprisingly lively evening of music from an era that can seem well-behaved but is often full of extremes. This was a world of prayer and seduction, violence and poise, spiritual reflection and instrumental bravura.

Moy, Ars Musica’s artistic director and harpsichordist, joined violinist Amelia Sie and cellist Anna Steinhoff in a program that made those tensions palpable. The concert also served as a preview of the group’s 2026–27 season, which begins November 13 with the first half of Arcangelo Corelli’s complete Op. 5 sonatas. It is a sensible project for Ars Musica. Corelli is often described as a foundational figure, which is true enough, though “foundational” can make him sound dutiful. In sympathetic hands, his music has a courtly surface and a distinctly human pulse.

Corelli’s Sonata in A major, Op. 5, No. 9, which ended Friday’s concert, made the case. Before playing it, Sie asked the packed audience at The CheckOut who was familiar with the term “historically informed performance,” which she, Moy and Steinhoff had been delivering that evening. Only a few hands went up. The question was useful. Historically informed performance can remain an insider phrase for a set of decisions that are, in fact, immediately audible.

The approach draws on period instruments, surviving treatises and habits of articulation and ornamentation associated with earlier performance traditions. Gut strings can sound rougher than their modern counterparts, yet they possess a striking variety of color. Their sound is less uniform. It catches the grain of a phrase. To ears trained on modern orchestral polish, that may initially seem foreign – even bracing. But Sie’s concise description also made clear that historically informed performance also informed the extremes of the era.

The three instruments retained distinct personalities. Sie’s violin could be incisive and brilliant, while Steinhoff supplied a darker, more grounded presence and Moy gave the music a firm rhythmic base. What made the ensemble compelling was how rarely those personalities sounded isolated.

In the Corelli, Ars Musica turned those historically informed features into expressive resources rather than matters of doctrine. Sie’s rhythms were clear but never stiff. Her phrases expanded and contracted with a natural, almost vocal sense of breath, while ornaments appeared with easy, playful precision. Sie remained the principal voice, but Moy and Steinhoff made the continuo feel like a conversation. They responded to her phrasing, nudged the pulse forward or held it back, and gave the performance the feeling of three musicians listening closely to one another. The performance had sharpness when it needed it, but did not confuse sharpness with aggression.

Sie’s brief explanation also captured what The CheckOut has done well since opening as a chamber music venue in a converted 7-Eleven: it has made experiencing music an act of discovery. Friday’s program rewarded that spirit, moving between brilliance and inwardness, turbulence and reflection, without allowing its works to blur into one another.

Heinrich Biber’s “Annunciation Sonata,” from the Rosary Sonatas, moved between brilliance and inwardness. It begins abruptly, as though Gabriel’s appearance before Mary were an interruption. Sie gave the opening its surprise, then let the music settle into a reflective exchange. In the variations that followed, Biber’s returning musical material evoked the Rosary’s devotional repetition: a familiar gesture revisited, never quite heard the same way twice.

Giuseppe Tartini’s “Devil’s Trill” Sonata provided the evening’s more flamboyant vision of the supernatural. According to the story Tartini later told to the astronomer Jérôme Lalande, the composer dreamed that he made a pact with the Devil, who then took up Tartini’s violin and played a sonata of impossible beauty and virtuosity. On waking, Tartini attempted to recapture what he had heard.

Sie resisted turning the last movement into a mere technical ordeal. Her playing had a disorienting quality, as though the music kept slipping away just as it seemed ready to settle. The famous trills became points of friction and instability, less displays of virtuosity than expressions of nervous energy.

The evening’s other surprises came from Giovanni Antonio Pandolfi and Alessandro Stradella. Pandolfi’s Sonata, Op. 3, No. 6, “La Sabbatina,” was restless, unpredictable, and almost improvisatory in effect. Its sudden turns gave all three players opportunities to speak vividly with one another. Sie remained the principal voice, but Steinhoff and Moy did far more than accompany, catching Pandolfi’s shifts with alert and memorable responses.

Stradella’s Sinfonia in D minor, which opened the recital, offered a more concentrated form of turbulence. Blustery at one moment and solemn at the next, it moved through sharply contrasted sections without losing its line. The players held firmly to the pulse, but nothing felt metronomic. It was an ideal way to begin a concert that offered a refreshingly textured take on baroque traditions. 

Originally published on Third Coast Review