By Daniel Buckwalter

Knock on wood, but the seemingly endless blue sky with its sticky heat that has baked lawns brown throughout our area may, finally, be giving way to the southern Willamette weather I enjoy most, cool temperatures with a grayish sky that brings forth rain and green grass.

To put it another way, it’s almost sweater season!

Perhaps a strange thing to come to mind during a classical music concert, but combine the ambience of Central Lutheran Church’s sanctuary (especially with minimal lighting) and the historically informed pieces played by the Oregon Bach Collegium, and there comes a real sense that summer is over. The sky is graying, and it’s time to come inside to enjoy beautiful music.

The Collegium opened its season on Sept. 13 at Central with a program titled Sounds of Sanssouci: Music from the Court of Frederick the Great, a reference to the king who presided over Prussia during the 16th century.

Played with period instruments, the Collegium for this performance had Kimary Fick on the traverso flute, Holly Roberts on violin, Tung Nguyen on harpsichord and organ and Ryan Ponto on the viola da gamba.

C.P.E. Bach’s Prelude in D Major (Nguyen on organ) and the tender Prussian Sonata No. 1 (Nguyen on harpsichord) were featured pieces, along with the delicate Minuet in E minor from Johann Joachim Quantz (Nguyen on harpsichord and Fick on traverso flute).

Other selections included Johann Gottlieb Graun’s Trio Sonata in G Major and Johann Sebastian Bach’s Sonata Sopr’il Soggetto Reale, featuring all four musicians.

The Oregon Bach Collegium is a collective of instrumentalists and singers whose core programming gives light to the medieval and Romantic periods of the 16th through 18th centuries.

If you haven’t had a chance to hear them perform, I urge you to do it. The Collegium will perform next at 1 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 11, with instrumentalists and singers, at the Hope Abbey Mausoleum, on the grounds of the historic Eugene Masonic Cemetery at East 25th Avenue and University Street.

(The 10-acre cemetery itself is something to see, being the oldest chartered cemetery in Eugene. It is the final resting place of many Eugene and Lane County luminaries, dating to 1859, the same year Oregon became a state.)

And by then, the full glory of autumn — and perhaps sweaters — will be with us.