(upbeat music) - Utopia Early Music breathes life into the Salt Lake City music scene with its historically informed performances of Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque music.

And here to tell us about an upcoming concert is founder and director Emily Nelson.

Hi Emily, welcome back.

- Hi, thank you so much for having me.

- Well, you know I love your concerts.

- Oh.

- They're beautiful.

- That means so much.

Thank you.

- So tell me what this concert is, it's the Life of Music of Salamone Rossi.

So tell us about Salamone Rossi.

- Sure, so, Salamone Rossi, he was alive and writing music and playing music at kind of what we think of now as the end of the Renaissance era and the beginning of the Baroque era.

And so that's one of the reasons why we picked him.

This is actually the first time we've ever focused on just one composer and we picked somebody that nobody's ever heard of.

But it's kind of an exciting moment because our program has those kind of Renaissance textures, like think of madrigals, where it's these soothing four voice textures, but then we also have sort of the Baroque side of things, which is more like individual expression and big feelings.

- Okay, and I know you have a variety of musicians who come to perform.

- We do.

- Tell us about the violinist you're going to work with.

- Sure, yeah, so this is a really exciting collaboration with my very dear friend, Shulamit Kleinerman, who lives up in Seattle.

She plays Renaissance violin and she actually conceived of this program way back before the pandemic.

So this is something that she's been kind of thinking about for a while and we're really excited to kind of see it through.

So, for this program, we have two violinists, a cello, a harpsichord and four voices.

- And you're one of the voices.

- I am one of the voices.

- A beautiful voice, I have to say.

- Thank you very much.

- Okay, and the concerts, tell us, is there a cost and where will this one be?

- Oh, sure.

So, there's no cost.

We do have a pay as able donation, that's kind of what we call it.

But it's really important to us that anybody who wants to can come to our concerts and have a good time this is gonna be at St. Mark's Episcopal Church at the first weekend of April.

- All right, well, looking forward to it and thank you for being here.

- Thank you so much.

- And if you'd like to know more about that upcoming concert featuring the work of Salamone Rossi, it's Utopia Early Music, it's April 6th and 7th at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark's in Salt Lake City.

Go to utopiaearlymusic.org, utopiaearlymusic.org.

I'm Mary Dickson Thanks for watching "Contact."

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