The name “Twelfth Night” may at first conjure up Shakespeare’s festive and lively comic play, not the baroque ensemble of the same name. But the musicians don’t mind — that’s the point.
Violinist Rachell Ellen Wong and keyboardist David Belkovski wanted to evoke revelry, celebration and community when they chose the moniker Twelfth Night for their group, which officially launched in 2021. Since then, the flexibly sized ensemble has presented everything from very small chamber music concerts to larger orchestral and operatic productions.
“Our performances tend to be pretty theatrical,” Belkovski said. “We hope people don’t walk away with just the music running through their heads. What we do is absolutely aural, but we own the theatrical element.”
San Diego Early Music Society (SDEMS) will present Twelfth Night on Saturday at St. James by-the-Sea in La Jolla. The concert will feature Wong, Belkovski and five other musicians.
Wong, 32, was the first baroque artist to receive an Avery Fisher Career Grant in 2020 and Belkovski, 30, became the first early-music specialist to receive New York’s Levinson Arts Achievement Award in 2021.
The two met in 2018 while earning their master’s degrees from the Juilliard School’s Historical Performance division. Belkovski now coaches at Juilliard and is assistant conductor at San Francisco Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra.
Wong, whose first public performance was at age 11, never felt comfortable with the way she — and almost everyone else — was being taught the music of Bach.
“I couldn’t explain it in words, but it didn’t feel right,” she said, from a tour stop in Seattle, where she grew up. “My dad brought home a CD of (British baroque violinist) Rachel Podger. I wondered why it was so different and fun. So, I started trying to copy the sound.
“That gave me the confidence to play it how I wanted to.”
Both Wong and Belkovski recall that their musical connection was fairly immediate.
They had planned to form a group, but the COVID lockdown put things on hold. They stayed in touch and performed the first Twelfth Night concert in 2021.
The ensemble is built on a spirit of independence and mutual iration.
“It’s really hard to find someone that you want to play with all the time and someone who you want to play many centuries of music with,” Wong said. “It was clear to me that David was extremely special. I’d never really met anyone that I wanted to perform with like that before.”
Belkovski, who plays harpsichord, piano and forte piano, believes his role is to create energy and texture under Wong’s violin playing.
“Rachell’s sound and musicality makes my job so easy and effortless is,” he said. “It’s as if her bow is at one with her breath. You don’t see that very often. And it’s why she attracts so many different audiences and plays around the world. She’s a special artist.”
From the beginning, the two musicians agreed that neither wanted a set number of players in Twelfth Night nor expectations of a certain repertoire. They hoped to, as Belkovski put it, “play everything from 1600 to 2024.”
Saturday’s concert here, billed as “British Orpheus,” will explore the early end of the spectrum with works by Handel, Purcell and several lesser-known composers. (Twelfth Knight is headlining this concert instead of the originally scheduled La Cetra Baroque Orchestra, which canceled its appearance.)
“For this program, we’ve taken selections from several genres of music,” said the Macedonian-born Belkovski, who grew up in Detroit and New York. “It represents a crucial moment when continental trends were making their way to England. The selections trace connections between Purcell and Handel, England’s two biggest names and most treasured compositional figures.”
Belkovski noted that the concert will feature unique arrangements.
“There are few expressive markings on baroque scores,” he said. “These composers and performers were endlessly creative in adapting and arranging.”
Wong often shows the audience what the scores being played by Belkovski look like.
“It’s really cool for me,” Wong said, “to see people understand that when David plays what’s written, which is bare bones, he’s making up 99 percent of the music.”
In May, Twelfth Night will make its Carnegie Hall debut with “Elemental,” a reimagining of baroque operatic and instrumental masterpieces. As at other Twelfth Night performances, Belkovski and Wong will lead the ensemble.
And how do they spend the rare moments when they aren’t pursuing musical endeavors?
“I’ve played tennis since I was 8,” Wong said. “During the pandemic, I started playing pickleball. It’s so much easier to get people who had never played racket sports into pickleball. David’s a victim of that and I’ve gotten my husband, Andrew, to play, too.”
“I read a ton,” Belkovski said. “Right now, I’m rereading the ‘Count of Monte Cristo.’ I watch a lot of the NBA — it’s almost like a soap opera; I keep up with the player dramas.”
Both are looking forward to playing in La Jolla, Wong for the second time, Belkovski for the first. Some baroque-music fans might recognize Wong from her SDEMS appearance in March 2022 as concertmaster with Ensemble Jupiter at St. James by-the-Sea.
“When we got to La Jolla, we walked around on the beach before our dress rehearsal,” she recalled.
“I being really taken with the hall. And everybody was so nice, welcoming us into the space. Same thing for the audience. It was a really great experience.”
Twelfth Night
When: 7:30 p.m. Saturday
Where: St James by-the-Sea, 743 Prospect St., La Jolla
Tickets: $10-$50
Phone: (619) 291-8246
Online: sdems.org
Wood is a freelance writer.
