The Quality of Mercy: Capitol Hill Chamber Music Festival

The 2026 Capitol Hill Chamber Music Festival in Annapolis is entitled "The Quality of Mercy" and celebrates our shared humanity through the musical depiction of experiences of conflict resolution and compassion. "The Quality of Mercy" on Wednesday, October 7 at 7:00 PM will feature baroque violinist Marlisa Woods, renaissance bassoonist Anna Marsh, renaissance flutist Jeffrey Cohan and baroque guitarist and theorbo player William Simms. Shakespeare remarked that "The quality of mercy is not strain’d, it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven" in "The Merchant of Venice", first performed in 1605. The Italian chamber music from this time to be included in this program for bassoon, transverse flute, violin and guitar was imbued with humanism's late 16th and early 17th century perspective that brought human emotion and individualism ever more poignantly into public consciousness in all the arts. Music embraced greater chromaticism and emotional palpability, leading to the unfolding of what we think of today as baroque style. Stunning and relatively unknown musical selections by Cima, Buonamente, Merula, Frescobaldi and others are to be performed on very rarely heard instruments.