The Chicago space’s fiftieth annual Bach Week Pageant will current 5 distinctly completely different Baroque live performance packages in Chicago and Evanston, Illinois, April 28 to Could 14, 2023.
The 2023 pageant marks the beginning of Bach Week’s golden anniversary celebration, which is able to conclude with the fiftieth anniversary version in spring 2024.
Nationally outstanding church musician Richard Webster has been the Evanston-based pageant’s music director and conductor since 1975. He carried out in and helped arrange the primary Bach Week in Could 1974, throughout his senior yr at Northwestern College’s College of Music, below his mentor, pageant founder Karel Paukert. The latter was affiliate professor of organ and church music at NU and organist and choirmaster at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Evanston, the pageant’s first dwelling.
“Our golden fiftieth season stays true to our mission of celebrating the incomparable music of Johann Sebastian Bach together with works by composers who illuminate Bach’s artistry, affect, and musical universe,” Webster says.
“We’re at all times exploring recent and interesting methods of doing that,” he says, akin to presenting artists and repertoire new to Bach Week.
Webster says most works on this season’s schedule are new to Bach Week, and a number of the different items have not been heard on the pageant in additional than three a long time.
The pageant will salute feminine composers of the Baroque and Late Renaissance eras with performances of their sacred and secular vocal music.
Performers making their Bach Week debuts embrace well-established artists with worldwide reputations for his or her recordings and stay performances, plus extremely achieved, rising younger professionals within the Chicago space.
“Within the true pageant spirit, every live performance is a one-time-only, not-to-be missed occasion,” Webster says, “and there is selection in each program.”
He says the fiftieth pageant upholds Bach Week’s custom of concert events carried out on the highest skilled degree, in intimate and moderate-size venues for a close-up viewers expertise, and at modest ticket costs. Admission is free to the pageant’s April 30 period-instrument chamber live performance in Chicago.
Pageant opener April 28 options large-scale sacred scores
Bach Week’s 2023 pageant opens with an overture: Georg Philipp Telemann’s Overture (Suite) in D Main for Two Trumpets, Timpani, Strings and Continuo, TWV 55:D18, at 7:30 p.m. Friday, April 28, at North Park College’s Anderson Chapel, 5159 N. Spaulding Avenue, Chicago.
This system options two large-scale sacred works of Bach: his New 12 months’s cantata “Jesu, nun sei gepreiset” (Jesus, now be praised), BWV 41; and motet “Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied” (Sing to the Lord a brand new music), BWV 225.
The cantata opens with an expansive chorale melody, backed by an orchestra of brass, percussion, woodwinds, and strings.
The motet is certainly one of Bach’s most formidable. It has been likened to a three-movement concerto for double choir that requires virtuosic choral singing.
As a part of the pageant’s first give attention to feminine composers, concertgoers will hear Raphaella Aleotti’s Late Renaissance motet “Angelus advert pastores ait” (The angel stated to the shepherds), Maria Xaveria Peruchona’s Baroque Easter anthem “Cessate tympana” (Silence your drums), and Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel’s stunning, early Romantic setting of the poem “Gebet in der Christnacht” (Prayer on Christmas Eve) for unaccompanied four-part refrain. Fanny and her youthful brother, composer Felix Mendelssohn, championed Bach’s music. A outstanding pianist and gifted composer, she is claimed to have performed 24 preludes from Bach’s “The Properly-Tempered Clavier” from reminiscence earlier than a non-public viewers at age 12.
Soloists are Lindsey Reynolds, soprano; Ryan Belongie, countertenor; Tyler Lee, tenor; and David Govertsen, bass-baritone, with the Bach Week Pageant Refrain and Orchestra, North Park College Chamber Singers, and members of Bella Voce, performed by Webster, with organist Jason J. Moy.
A brand new voice at Bach Week, Reynolds is a member of the Lyric Opera of Chicago’s Ryan Opera Heart Ensemble and the recipient of many first-place awards. She has appeared in live performance with the Curtis Symphony Orchestra below Yannick Nézet-Séguin and with the Philadelphia Orchestra below Stéphane Denève. At Lyric Opera this season, she sang roles in Verdi’s “Don Carlos” and Rossini’s “Le Comte Ory.” She’ll make her Grant Park Music Pageant debut this summer time in a program performed by Ludovic Morlot.
One other pageant newcomer is Belongie, whom Opera Information has praised for his “remarkably heat, evenly produced voice, and his supple phrasing [that] included many an beautiful shade.” His latest and upcoming Baroque music performances embrace a Midwest tour of Bach’s “St. John Ardour” with the Leipzig Baroque Orchestra, a return to Music of the Baroque, the “St. John Ardour” with the Apollo Refrain of Chicago and Elmhurst Symphony, and the position of Ottone in Claudio Monteverdi’s opera “L’incoronazione di Poppea” at Boston Baroque.
Supported partly by a grant from the Elizabeth F. Cheney Basis, the live performance is a partnership between the Bach Week Pageant and North Park College’s College of Music, Artwork, and Theatre.
Music of Bach and different Baroque masters, on interval devices
The sounds of “Bach’s Musical World” will reverberate all through a free chamber music live performance on interval devices at 3 p.m. Sunday, April 30, at All Saints’ Episcopal Church, 4550 N. Hermitage Avenue, in Chicago’s Ravenswood neighborhood.
Curated by early music specialist Jason J. Moy, Bach Week’s principal organist and harpsichordist, the hourlong program “options works by a few of Bach’s most influential forebears in addition to a few of his direct contemporaries and different composers whose works he knew and deeply admired,” Moy says.
This system opens with a nod to Bach Week’s golden fiftieth season: the primary motion of Bach’s “Goldberg Variations,” BWV 988, carried out on the not often heard archlute.
Different works on this system embrace Dieterich Buxtehude’s Trio Sonata in A Minor, Op. 1, No. 3, BuxWV 254; and two of George Frideric Handel’s German arias, “Singe, Seele Gott zum Preise,” (Soul, sing praises to God), HWV 206; and “Meine Seele hört im Sehen” (My soul hears by sight), HWV 207.
Additionally: Two excerpts from François Couperin’s “Pièces de Clavecin,” Livre II, “La Ménetou” and “Les Baricades Mistérieuses” (The Mysterious Barricades); Antonio Vivaldi’s intimate solo cantata “Amor hai vinto” (Love has gained), RV 651; and Buxtehude’s Trio Sonata in A Main, Op. 2, No. 5, BuxWV 263.
Artists embrace Hannah De Priest, soprano; Adriane Put up, Baroque violin; Anna Steinhoff, viola da gamba; Brandon Acker, archlute; and Moy on harpsichord. All are among the many prime rank of Chicago’s period-instrument musicians.
De Priest, Put up, and Acker are making their Bach Week debuts.
Moy is creative director of Ars Musica Chicago and a school member on the Mead Witter College of Music on the College of Wisconsin-Madison, Chicago Faculty of Performing Arts at Roosevelt College, and at DePaul College College of Music, the place he’s the inaugural recipient of the Monsignor Kenneth J. Velo Endowed Distinguished Professorship.
The free live performance is funded by way of a beneficiant donation from Margaret and Bob McCamant.
Doubling up: Concertos for 2 keyboards and cellos by Bach and Vivaldi Could 12
The pageant’s “Virtuoso Soloists” program will characteristic a Bach double keyboard concerto, an Antonio Vivaldi concerto for 2 cellos, a Silvius Leopold Weiss guitar concerto, a Bach violin partita, and two virtuosic songs by Barbara Strozzi, prolific Venetian composer of vocal music and virtuoso singer, at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Could 12, at Evanston’s Nichols Live performance Corridor.
Pianists Marta Aznavoorian and Jorge Federico will solo in Bach’s Concerto for Two Keyboards in C Minor, BWV 1060. Each artists are making their Bach Week Pageant debuts. This may even be their first public efficiency as a piano duo. Each have toured internationally and recorded extensively for Chicago’s Cedille Data label, Aznavoorian as a part of the Billboard-charting Aznavoorian Duo and Grammy-nominated Lincoln Trio and Osorio in solo piano works by a variety of composers.
Cellists David Cunliffe and Paul Dwyer are soloists in Vivaldi’s Concerto for Two Cellos in G Minor, RV 531. Cunliffe, is a member of the Lincoln Trio and Black Oak Ensemble, the internationally touring string trio with a latest Billboard-charting album on Cedille Data. Cunliffe has carried out at previous festivals as an ensemble artist; that is his debut as soloist. Making his first look at Bach Week, Dwyer is adept on each trendy and interval devices. He’s assistant principal cello of the Lyric Opera Orchestra and a founding father of period-instrument Diderot String Quartet and early-music ensemble ACRONYM.
Boston-based guitarist Adam Levin, who grew up in suburban Lake Bluff, Illinois, makes a long-awaited return to the pageant. He’ll solo in Weiss’s Concerto in D Minor for Guitar and String Orchestra. Weiss, a German Baroque composer and lutenist, was admired throughout Europe for his lute enjoying and was identified personally by Bach and Handel.
Levin is a prize-winning and Billboard chart-topping recording artist. Praised for his “visceral and imaginative performances” by the Washington Put up, he has carried out on 4 continents throughout the globe.
One other Bach Week stalwart, violinist Desirée Ruhstrat of the Lincoln Trio and Black Oak Ensemble, will play Bach’s solo Violin Partita No. 3 in E Main, BWV 1006. Its opening motion is likely one of the nice Baroque showpieces for violin, with particular results and good passage work.
In one other Bach Week highlight on feminine composers, mezzo-soprano Lindsay Metzger, who made a superb Bach Week debut final season, will sing Strozzi’s “Che si puo fare” (What will be accomplished) and “L’astratto” (Distracted Lover) for soprano and basso continuo.
Webster will conduct the Bach Week Pageant Orchestra, with Moy on harpsichord.
‘Bach within the Gardens of Alhambra’ with guitarist Adam Levin Could 12
Classical guitarist Levin will current a solo recital titled “Bach within the Gardens of Alhambra” at a Candlelight Live performance 10 p.m. on Could 12 within the foyer of Nichols Live performance Corridor.
Levin will carry out music of J.S. Bach and Spanish composers. Works embrace Bach’s Lute Suite in E Main, BWV 1006a; Manuel De Falla’s “Homenaje pour Le Tombeau de Claude Debussy”; Salvador Brotons’ “Sonata Sefardita,” Op. 143; and Joaquín Turina’s “Sevillana.”
From 2008-2011, as a Fulbright Scholar and with grants from extra sources, he researched up to date Spanish guitar repertoire in Madrid, Spain. His three-year residency resulted in a serious collaboration with 30 Spanish composers spanning 4 generations, who every wrote works commissioned by and devoted to Levin. He has launched three albums of twenty first century Spanish guitar music on the Naxos label. A fourth installment, on Frameworks Data, reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Conventional Classical Albums chart.
The guitarist’s stay performances have been featured nationally on NPR’s “Efficiency At present” and the nationally syndicated “Classical Guitar Alive.” He has carried out from the studios of main classical radio stations together with Chicago’s WFMT and Boston’s WCRB.
Levin is professor of classical guitar on the College of Rhode Island and creative director of the College of Rhode Island Guitar Pageant.
Persevering with a Candlelight Live performance custom, Bach Week invitations friends to partake of a complimentary glass of champagne and connoisseur candies throughout the live performance.
Babayan Performs Bach: The ‘Goldberg Variations’ Could 14
Bringing Bach Week’s golden season to shut, Sergei Babayan, the celebrated Armenian American pianist praised by The New York Instances for his “consummate method and perception,” will play Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” at 3 p.m. Sunday, Could 14, at Nichols Live performance Corridor.
Written as a set of workouts for achieved harpsichordists, the legendary “Goldbergs” consists of an aria, or opening theme, adopted by 30 variations on its bass line and ending with a repeat of the unique aria.
Nationwide Public Radio has described the work as “an iconic monument in Western music. On one degree, it is merely an exquisite keyboard work, and on one other, it is a Rubik’s Dice of invention and structure.”
A Bach Week favourite, Babayan, who is predicated in New York, is an unique Deutsche Grammophon recording artist. His album “Rachmaninoff” was hailed by the worldwide press as a groundbreaking recording and acquired quite a few awards together with BBC Recording of the Month. His first album for the label, “Prokofiev for Two,” was a duo partnership with Martha Argerich and options Babayan’s personal transcriptions for 2 pianos of actions from Sergei Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet” and different works.
Babayan’s Bach Week recital comes throughout a break from his worldwide live performance tour with younger piano famous person Daniil Trifonov, certainly one of his former college students, with whom he is performing Rachmaninov’s main works for 2 pianos and the composer’s personal association of his “Symphonic Dances” in London, Amsterdam, Paris, Brussels, and past.
Babayan’s ardour for Bach’s music led him to check with German conductor Helmuth Rilling, co-founder and longtime music director of the venerable Oregon Bach Pageant.
In June, Babayan will carry out the “Goldberg Variations” in Leipzig, Germany, the town the place Bach composed them.
“When Sergei performs Bach on the piano, his vary of expression is the same as the vary of expression in all of Bach’s music,” Bach Week’s Webster says. “The sounds he will get out of the piano are sounds I’ve by no means heard earlier than in Bach’s keyboard works. And he does it in probably the most convincing approach.”
Babayan’s recital is sponsored by the Howard S. Dubin Household Basis.
Tickets and Data
Single tickets to every of the April 28, Could 12, and Could 14 mainstage concert events are $50 for VIP seating. Normal admission is $35 for adults, $25 seniors, and $15 college students with ID. A 3-concert subscription is $120 for VIP seating, $80 adults, $60 seniors, and $30 college students.
All tickets for the Could 12 “Candlelight Live performance,” within the Nichols Corridor foyer, are $25.
Admission is free to the April 30 live performance at All Saints’ Church, however reservations are required as a result of seating is proscribed.
Tickets and knowledge can be found at bachweek.org/2023-festival, by telephone (847) 269-9050, and by emailing the pageant at data@bachweek.org. Mail orders will be despatched to Bach Week Pageant, 1555 Sherman Avenue, Suite 312, Evanston, Illinois 60201.
Bach Week Pageant
A musical ceremony of spring on Chicago’s North Shore since 1974, Bach Week is likely one of the Midwest’s premiere Baroque music festivals. The occasion enlists musicians from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Lyric Opera of Chicago Orchestra, and different top-tier ensembles, whereas that includes a number of the Chicago space’s most interesting instrumental and vocal soloists and distinguished visitor artists from out of city. Web site: bachweek.org
Funding for the 2023 Bach Week pageant comes from the Illinois Arts Council Company; the MacArthur Funds for Tradition, Fairness, and the Arts on the Richard H. Driehaus Basis; the Howard S. Dubin Household Basis; the Elizabeth F. Cheney Basis; and Margaret and Bob McCamant.
2023 Bach Week Pageant Schedule
All packages are topic to alter.
Friday, April 28, 7:30 p.m.
Anderson Chapel, North Park College
5159 N. Spaulding Avenue
Chicago, Illinois 60625
“Opening Evening”
Sunday, April 30, 3:00 PM
All Saints’ Episcopal Church
4550 N. Hermitage Avenue
Chicago, Illinois 60640
“Bach’s Musical World”
Friday, Could 12, 7:30 p.m.
Nichols Live performance Corridor
1490 Chicago Avenue
Evanston, Illinois 60201
“Virtuoso Soloists”
Friday, Could 12, 10:00 p.m.
Nichols Live performance Corridor (foyer)
1490 Chicago Avenue
Evanston, Illinois 60201
Candlelight Live performance: “Bach within the Gardens of Alhambra”
Sunday, Could 14, 3 p.m.
Nichols Live performance Corridor
1490 Chicago Avenue
Evanston, Illinois 60201
“Babayan Performs Bach: The ‘Goldberg Variations'”
