Bach Week Festival
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This spring’s ‘golden’ season offers five one-time-only Baroque concerts spotlighting soloists and repertoire new to the festival, including works by female composers
J.S. Bach cantata and motet to be heard April 28 at Chicago’s North Park University alongside vocal works by Raphaella Aleotti, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel,and Maria Xaveria Peruchona.
Free period-instrument chamber concert, ‘Bach’s Musical World,’ April 30 at All Saints’ Church in Chicago’s Ravenswood neighborhood
Concertos by Bach, Vivaldi, and Weiss, plus a Bach violin partita and songs by Barbara Strozzi May 12 at Evanston’s Nichols Concert Hall, followed by guitarist Adam Levin’s late-evening Candlelight Concert, ‘Bach in the Gardens of Alhambra’
Gold-plated finale: Pianist Sergei Babayan to play Bach’s ‘Goldberg Variations’ May 14 at Nichols Hall
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EVANSTON, Ill., February 25, 2023 — The Chicago area’s 50th annual Bach Week Festival will present five distinctly different Baroque concert programs in Chicago and Evanston, Illinois, April 28 to May 14, 2023.
The 2023 festival marks the start of Bach Week’s golden anniversary celebration, which will conclude with the 50th anniversary edition in spring 2024.
Nationally prominent church musician Richard Webster has been the Evanston-based festival’s music director and conductor since 1975. He performed in and helped organize the first Bach Week in May 1974, during his senior year at Northwestern University’s School of Music, under his mentor, festival founder Karel Paukert. The latter was associate professor of organ and church music at NU and organist and choirmaster at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Evanston, the festival’s first home.
“Our golden 50th season remains true to our mission of celebrating the incomparable music ofJohann Sebastian Bach along with works by composers who illuminate Bach’s artistry, influence, and musical universe,” Webster says. “We’re always exploring fresh and engaging ways of doing that,” he says, such as presenting artists and repertoire new to Bach Week.
Webster says most works on this season’s schedule are new to Bach Week, and some of the other pieces haven’t been heard at the festival in more than three decades.
The festival will salute female composers of the Baroque and Late Renaissance eras with performances of their sacred and secular vocal music.
Performers making their Bach Week debuts include well-established artists with international reputations for their recordings and live performances, plus highly accomplished, rising young professionals in the Chicago area.
“In the true festival spirit, each concert is a one-time-only, not-to-be missed event,” Webster says, “and there’s variety in every program.” He says the 50th festival upholds Bach Week’s tradition of concerts performed at the highest professional level, in intimate and moderate-size venues for a close-up audience experience, and at modest ticket prices. Admission is free to the festival’s April 30 period-instrument chamber concert in Chicago.
Festival opener April 28 features large-scale sacred scores
Bach Week’s 2023 festival opens with an overture: Georg Philipp Telemann’s Overture (Suite) in D Major for Two Trumpets, Timpani, Strings and Continuo, TWV 55:D18, at 7:30 p.m. Friday, April 28, at North Park University’s Anderson Chapel, 5159 N. Spaulding Avenue, Chicago.
The program features two large-scale sacred works of Bach: his New Year’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 new song), BWV 225. The cantata opens with an expansive chorale melody, backed by an orchestra of brass, percussion, woodwinds, and strings. The motet is one of Bach’s most ambitious. It’s been likened to a three-movement concerto for double choir that requires virtuosic choral singing.
As part of the festival’s first focus on female composers, concertgoers will hear Raphaella Aleotti’s Late Renaissance motet “Angelus ad pastores ait” (The angel said to the shepherds), Maria Xaveria Peruchona’s Baroque Easter anthem “Cessate tympana” (Silence your drums), and Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel’s beautiful, early Romantic setting of the poem “Gebet in der Christnacht” (Prayer on Christmas Eve) for unaccompanied four-part chorus. Fanny and her younger brother, composer Felix Mendelssohn, championed Bach’s music. A remarkable pianist and gifted composer, she is said to have played 24 preludes from Bach’s “The Well- Tempered Clavier” from memory before a private audience at age 12.
Soloists are Lindsey Reynolds, soprano; Ryan Belongie, countertenor; Tyler Lee, tenor; and David Govertsen, bass-baritone, with the Bach Week Festival Chorus and Orchestra, North Park University Chamber Singers, and members of Bella Voce, conducted by Webster, with organist Jason J. Moy.
A new voice at Bach Week, Reynolds is a member of the Lyric Opera of Chicago’s Ryan Opera Center Ensemble and the recipient of many first-place awards. She has appeared in concert with the Curtis Symphony Orchestra under Yannick Nézet-Séguin and with the Philadelphia Orchestra under 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 Festival debut this summer in a program conducted by Ludovic Morlot.
Another festival newcomer is Belongie, whom Opera News has praised for his “remarkably warm, evenly produced voice, and his supple phrasing [that] included many an exquisite shade.” His recent and upcoming Baroque music performances include a Midwest tour of Bach’s “St. John Passion” with the Leipzig Baroque Orchestra, a return to Music of the Baroque, the “St. John Passion” with the Apollo Chorus of Chicago and Elmhurst Symphony, and the role of Ottone in Claudio Monteverdi’s opera “L’incoronazione di Poppea” at Boston Baroque.
Supported in part by a grant from the Elizabeth F. Cheney Foundation, the concert is a partnership between the Bach Week Festival and North Park University’s School of Music, Art, and Theatre.
Music of Bach and other Baroque masters, on period instruments
The sounds of “Bach’s Musical World” will reverberate throughout a free chamber music concert on period instruments at 6 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 “features works by some of Bach’s most influential forebears as well as some of his direct contemporaries and other composers whose works he knew and deeply admired,” Moy says.
The program closes with a nod to Bach Week’s golden 50th season: the first movement of Bach’s “Goldberg Variations,” BWV 988, performed on the rarely heard archlute.
Other works on the program include 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. Also: 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 won), RV 651; and Buxtehude’s Trio Sonata in A Major, Op. 2, No. 5, BuxWV 263.
Artists include Hannah De Priest, soprano; Adriane Post, Baroque violin; Anna Steinhoff, viola da gamba; Brandon Acker, archlute; and Moy on harpsichord. All are among the top rank of Chicago’s period-instrument musicians.
De Priest, Post, and Acker are making their Bach Week debuts. Moy is artistic director of Ars Musica Chicago and a faculty member at the Mead Witter School of Music at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University, and at DePaul University School of Music, where he is the inaugural recipient of the Monsignor Kenneth J. Velo Endowed Distinguished Professorship.
The free concert is funded through a generous donation from Margaret and Bob McCamant.
Doubling up: Concertos for two keyboards and cellos by Bach and Vivaldi May 12
The festival’s “Virtuoso Soloists” program will feature a Bach double keyboard concerto, an Antonio Vivaldi concerto for two 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, May 12, at Evanston’s Nichols Concert Hall.
Pianists Marta Aznavoorian and Jorge Federico will solo in Bach’s Concerto for Two Keyboards in C Minor, BWV 1060. Both artists are making their Bach Week Festival debuts. This will also be their first public performance as a piano duo. Both have toured internationally and recorded extensively for Chicago’s Cedille Records label, Aznavoorian as part of the Billboard-charting Aznavoorian Duo and Grammy-nominated Lincoln Trio and Osorio in solo piano works by a wide range 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 recent Billboard-charting album on Cedille Records. Cunliffe has performed at past festivals as an ensemble artist; this is his debut as soloist. Making his first appearance at Bach Week, Dwyer is adept on both modern and period instruments. He is assistant principal cello of the Lyric Opera Orchestra and a founder 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 festival. He’ll solo in Weiss’s Concerto in D Minor for Guitar and String Orchestra. Weiss, a German Baroque composer and lutenist, was admired across Europe for his lute playing and was known 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 Post, he has performed on four continents across the globe.
Another 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 Major, BWV 1006. Its opening movement is one of the great Baroque showpieces for violin, with special effects and brilliant passage work.
In another Bach Week spotlight on female composers, mezzo-soprano Lindsay Metzger, who made a brilliant Bach Week debut last season, will sing Strozzi’s “L’astratto” (Distracted Lover) for soprano and basso continuo.
Webster will conduct the Bach Week Festival Orchestra, with Moy on harpsichord.
‘Bach in the Gardens of Alhambra’ with guitarist Adam Levin May 12
Classical guitarist Levin will present a solo recital titled “Bach in the Gardens of Alhambra” at a Candlelight Concert 10 p.m. on May 12 in the lobby of Nichols Concert Hall.
Levin will perform music of J.S. Bach and Spanish composers. Works include Bach’s Lute Suite in E Major, 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 additional sources, he researched contemporary Spanish guitar repertoire in Madrid, Spain. His three-year residency resulted in a major collaboration with 30 Spanish composers spanning four generations, who each wrote works commissioned by and dedicated to Levin. He has released three albums of 21 st century Spanish guitar music on the Naxos label. A fourth installment, on Frameworks Records, reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Traditional Classical Albums chart.
The guitarist’s live performances have been featured nationally on NPR’s “Performance Today” and the nationally syndicated “Classical Guitar Alive.” He has performed from the studios of major classical radio stations including Chicago’s WFMT and Boston’s WCRB.
Levin is professor of classical guitar at the University of Rhode Island and artistic director of the University of Rhode Island Guitar Festival.
Continuing a Candlelight Concert tradition, Bach Week invites guests to partake of a complimentary glass of champagne and gourmet chocolates during the concert.
Babayan Plays Bach: The ‘Goldberg Variations’ May 14
Bringing Bach Week’s golden season to close, Sergei Babayan, the celebrated Armenian American pianist praised by The New York Times for his “consummate technique and insight,” will play Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” at 3 p.m. Sunday, May 14, at Nichols Concert Hall.
Written as a set of exercises for accomplished harpsichordists, the legendary “Goldbergs” consists of an aria, or opening theme, followed by 30 variations on its bass line and ending with a repeat of the original aria. National Public Radio has described the work as “an iconic monument in Western music. On one level, it’s simply a beautiful keyboard work, and on another, it’s a Rubik’s Cube of invention and architecture.”
A Bach Week favorite, Babayan, who is based in New York, is an exclusive Deutsche Grammophon recording artist. His album “Rachmaninoff” was hailed by the international press as a groundbreaking recording and received numerous awards including BBC Recording of the Month. His first album for the label, “Prokofiev for Two,” was a duo partnership with Martha Argerich and features Babayan’s own transcriptions for two pianos of movements from Sergei Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet” and other works.
Babayan’s Bach Week recital comes during a break from his international concert tour with young piano superstar Daniil Trifonov, one of his former students, with whom he’s performing Rachmaninov’s major works for two pianos and the composer’s own arrangement of his “Symphonic Dances” in London, Amsterdam, Paris, Brussels, and beyond.
Babayan’s passion for Bach’s music led him to study with German conductor Helmuth Rilling, co-founder and longtime music director of the venerable Oregon Bach Festival.
In June, Babayan will perform the “Goldberg Variations” in Leipzig, Germany, the city where Bach composed them.
“When Sergei plays Bach on the piano, his range of expression is equal to the range of expression in all of Bach’s music,” Bach Week’s Webster says. “The sounds he gets out of thepiano are sounds I’ve never heard before in Bach’s keyboard works. And he does it in the most convincing way.”
Babayan’s recital is sponsored by the Howard S. Dubin Family Foundation.
Tickets and Information
Single tickets to each of the April 28, May 12, and May 14 mainstage concerts are $50 for VIP seating. General admission is $35 for adults, $25 seniors, and $15 students with ID. A three- concert subscription is $120 for VIP seating, $80 adults, $60 seniors, and $30 students.
All tickets for the May 12 “Candlelight Concert,” in the Nichols Hall lobby, are $25.
Admission is free to the April 30 concert at All Saints Episopal Church, but reservations are required because seating is limited.
Bach Week Festival
A musical rite of spring on Chicago’s North Shore since 1974, Bach Week is one of the Midwest’s premiere Baroque music festivals. The event enlists musicians from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Lyric Opera of Chicago Orchestra, and other top-tier ensembles, while featuring some of the Chicago area’s finest instrumental and vocal soloists and distinguished guest artists from out of town.
Funding for the 2023 Bach Week festival comes from the Illinois Arts Council Agency; the MacArthur Funds for Culture, Equity, and the Arts at the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation; the Howard S. Dubin Family Foundation; the Elizabeth F. Cheney Foundation; and Margaret and Bob McCamant.
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