Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra taps into an expressive era.

There’s is a movement afoot in classical circles involving both players and listeners, a resurgence of so-called “early music” performed on instruments from that historical period. European classical music had its best-known pieces written in the 1700s and 1800s, so early music has come to mean music written prior to that, thus designating the Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque periods. The latter will be the focus this weekend when the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra visits the Peninsula for the third time.

The ensemble is widely regarded as among the finest interpreters of this genre in the world today, and is led by violinist Elizabeth Blumenstock.

Blumenstock was first smitten years ago. Her church organist mother used to play Bach and others as background. “I grew up listening to Baroque music,” Blumenstock says. “I didn’t pay a lot of attention to it. It was just kind of there.”

Things began in earnest for her in the early ’70s when the first recordings of the Bach cantatas performed on Baroque instruments came out.

“That began the revival of interest in period performance,” Blumenstock says. “The music was so expressive and the instrumental timbres so beautiful that I was captivated. It’s become a full-on revival these days.”

Her violin bows help tell the story: The Baroque bow makes for livelier articulation. “The modern bow is more inclined to make long singing lines of great strength, so that’s a big difference,” she says. “I love to play with a Baroque bow. I feel like I’m dancing. It jumps off the string, it bends down into the string. It doesn’t just lie on the string and go back and forth like a modern bow does. There’s a place for both, but I would no more use my modern bow to play Bach than I would use my Baroque bow to play a Tchaikovsky concerto.”

Blumenstock’s program this weekend is entitled Venice, Vivaldi, Visitors, and Virtuosi, and there are a couple of pieces she has a soft spot for.

“I’m very enchanted with the Tartini violin concerto,” she says. “It’s a lively, imaginative piece. And I’m charmed by the Pisendel concerto. I had never heard of it before. I was thrilled to find it and have come to like it very much.”

Carmel Music Society’s Anne Thorp says Blumenstock is outgoing on stage. “It should be a fun concert. It’s baroque but the selections are not stuffy,” she says. “Venice back then was to Europe what Las Vegas is to America these days.”

PHILHARMONIA BAROQUE ORCHESTRA 3pm Sunday, Nov. 5. Sunset Center, San Carlos between Eighth and Ninth, Carmel. $45-$60. 620-2048, sunsetcenter.org .