Around the table sit four musicians: MengHan, holding his Baroque violin; Xander, cradling his viola da gamba; Isabel, at the keys of her harpsichord and organ; and Līga, who sings and also plays the violin.
Red Table is a space where ideas take shape and become musical narratives. The ensemble invites audiences into a dialogue that reveals the drama within poetry. It performs Baroque rhetorical music, in which emotion and reason find balance and work together to convey human experience.
Its repertoire ranges from mystical seventeenth-century German sacred music by composers such as Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber and Johann Christoph Bach to theatrical eighteenth-century Italian sonatas and cantatas by Alessandro Scarlatti and George Frideric Handel. Depending on the repertoire and the venue, the ensemble performs with either church organ or harpsichord, allowing each program to create its own imagined sonic world.
Red Table creates poetic programs inspired by literature and thematic narratives, including Dark Night of the Soul, reflecting the soul’s inner spiritual journey inspired by the poetry ofSan Juan de la Cruz, and Seven Nights, exploring desire, dreams, nightmares and love in the world of the night.
Rather than merely reconstructing the past, Red Table approaches historically informed performance as a living practice — grounded in research and continually searching for new ways to deliver the affect present in the music.
When the music begins, gathering and resonance merge into a shared experience of life, as performers and audience breathe together in the same time and space.