Bach Festival Returns Better Than Ever

Now in its fourth year, The Middlebury Bach Festival is aiming to offer its most diverse and ambitious program to date when the inaugural festival’s guest scholar Christoph Wolff returns for a three-day extravaganza of events April 25-27.

Students, affiliate artists, faculty and professional musicians from the community and the greater New England area will join Wolff to celebrate the music and influence of 18th century German Baroque composer Johann Sebastian Bach.

Wolff, former Adams University Research Professor at Harvard University and recipient of an Honorary Doctorate from the College in 2012, is one of the most prominent Bach scholars in the nation, and his second visit to the Festival is representative of his involvement in the early planning stages of the popular annual event.

The Festival’s organizers, Associate Professor of Music and Director of Choral Activities Jeffrey Buettner and soprano, voice teacher and Director of Music at the Congregational Church of Middlebury Jessica Allen, were inspired to create the Bach Festival after participating in an American Choral Director’s Association Bach conducting symposium.

“Jessica, my wife, and I left that event and it was simple, really,” Buettner said. “She said ‘We should have a Bach Festival in Middlebury,’ and then we were going to Leipzig anyway to see their Bach festival, and we thought we’d try and make an appointment with Christoph Wolff at the Leipzig Bach Festival, which he directed, and he said that he was interested. Suddenly, we had a guest, we had an idea for some music, and things took off from there.”

Allen and Buettner have been looking for an opportunity to invite Wolff back to the Festival since his participation in 2011, and the scholar’s recent retirement from Harvard and the Leipzig Bach Festival allowed for a rare scheduling availability.

Before Wolff gives a lecture as a part of Saturday’s events, cellist Sophie Shao and violinist Soovin Kim will open the Festival on Friday, April 25 with a program of the unaccompanied works of J.S. Bach for cello and violin. Both musicians have connections with the area, as Shao is frequently featured in the College’s Performing Arts Series and Kim directs the Lake Champlain Chamber Music Festival, but both have also been acclaimed on the world stage. The concert is at 8 p.m. in the Concert Hall of the Kevin P. Mahaney ’84 Center for the Arts, and tickets are $25 for regular admission, $20 for faculty, staff and other affiliates with an ID and $6 for students.

Three free interest sessions continue the Festival on Saturday in the Concert Hall.

“Our interest sessions are more diverse than we’ve perhaps had in the past,” Buettner said. “We have two different instrument families covered in those sessions, and then in the afternoon we hear a talk that contextualizes the Bach piece itself, so it’s a very broad appeal. This time, only one of the sessions really frames the concert, and the other two draw interesting sounds and technique from the instruments in the orchestra. In that way, the Festival has expanded a bit.”

The first 10 a.m. session, ‘Unaccompanied Bach: Bach’s Solo Works for Cello and Violin’ is offered by the previous evening’s performers, Shao and Kim, and oboist Cheryl Bishkoff will follow at 11 a.m. with ‘Demonstration of Oboe, Oboe d’amore, English Horn, and Oboe da Caccia in the Music of J.S. Bach.’

At 1:30 p.m., Wolff will be talking about the Saturday evening Festival concert piece, Bach’s Ascension Oratorio, and its context in ‘From Christmas to Ascension Day: J.S. Bach’s Unique Oratorio Cycle.’

“We performed the Easter Oratorio two years ago and the Christmas Oratorio will probably be two years from now, so it’s a terrific topic,” Buettner said of the lecture. “It’s timely and useful in terms of our Bach Festival on a larger scale, just as Bach was thinking about music in a larger context. We often admire that Bach wrote a piece with a complicated and sophisticated architecture, but that expands further into groups of pieces over months or even in an entire year he thought about a comprehensive musical concept, so it’s philosophy and theology and intellect as well as musicianship.”

Two free events follow in the afternoon in anticipation of the evening Festival Concert, including a carillon recital by Middlebury College carillonneur George Matthew, Jr. at 3 p.m. at Mead Chapel. Classical guitarist and College Affiliate Artist Eric Despard will provide patrons of 51 Main with music by Bach and other composers from 6 to 7:30 p.m.

The culmination of Saturday’s events comes in the form of the grand Festival Concert at 8 p.m. in Mead Chapel, opening with Antonio Vivaldi’s four violin concertos The Four Seasons featuring violin soloist Katherine Winterstein.

The Vivaldi violin concertos were chosen for their audience appeal and because they are most often heard as sound bites, not performed live. The cyclical plan of the seasons and the sense of renewal also corresponded thematically to the renewal found in the Ascension Oratorio.

Each concerto is written to capture the sounds and ideas of the season it represents, and Vermont Public Radio commentator Linda Radtke will narrate with poetry, potentially written by Vivaldi himself, which draws the audience’s attention to these ideas.

Bach studied and transcribed Vivaldi, so including the pieces provides greater insight into the context of music at the time.

The Four Seasons will be performed in a somewhat unorthodox manner, with one player taking on each orchestral part rather than a soloist and a large orchestra.

“It’s an intimate setting and you can really hear the inside of the score,” Buettner said. “Also, that performance features a student. It’s a professional ensemble with the exception of violist Matt Weinert-Stein ’14, and it’s a great opportunity for him to play all by himself with a professional ensemble.”

Buettner will conduct the College Choir and festival orchestra as they perform Bach’s Ascension Oratorio. Four professional vocal soloists, soprano and College Affiliate Artist Carol Christensen, alto Linda Radtke, tenor Adam Hall and bass Stephen Falbel will join the ensembles for the major work.

“I’m excited for the audience to hear our really remarkable guests and to hear the Vivaldi and the Bach Oratorio side-by-side and feel the exciting impact of those pieces,” Buettner said. “For the students, I’m excited for them to perform their piece and then hear the Vivaldi beside their performance and sense that excitement and energy that the music carries. I think that when we hear something that is related to what we do, we can be more excited about what we’re doing.”

Tickets to the Saturday evening event are free for students, $10 for faculty, staff and affiliates with ID and $12 for the public.

Throughout the four years of the Festival, over 90 singers and 30 instrumentalists have participated, creating a unique blend of repeat performers and new musicians every year.

“We try to find something new and interesting that comes out of this idea of Bach, which has a tendency to become ‘Early Classical Music’ in quotations, like a genre,” Buettner said. “The piece itself is not necessarily different from previous pieces, but the point is we will find other things about the Festival that bring out something new and fresh. This year, that’s the idea of renewal and connecting what the texts are talking about.”

At the Sunday, April 27 concert at 3 p.m. in Mead Chapel, the College Choir will sing some of the selections they will performing for their May 27 to June 9 tour to Berlin, Prague, Leipzig and Vienna.

Since the students are participating in a concert tour to Europe, they will be singing primarily new North and South American music compositions, with the addition of folk music from a living Ukrainian composer.  The concert will start with the Collegium, a smaller ensemble composed of four Choir students and Buettner, singing three early Baroque selections thematically connected to the ideas of rebirth and renewal emphasized in the previous evening’s concert. The rest of the program includes the selection of material for a European audience that represents the College with international and contemporary American aspects.

Buettner, who conducts the College Choir, has been helping to plan the tour for at least three years, and he has visited the tour sites twice in preparation for the trip. Since the last major Choir tour to San Francisco in 2011, an endowment for touring was established to help lower student contributions toward the cost of the 2014 voyage.

Some of the highlights of the trip will be singing in Berlin with the Berlin Cathedral Choir, performing with a guest choir in one of Bach’s churches, Saint Nicholas, in Leipzig and visiting Saint Peter’s Church in Vienna.

“We are all excited to take this music that we have been preparing and go sing it, and that’s it,” Buettner said. “No homework, no schoolwork, no impending deadlines. Without the pressures of everything else in life, we get to experience another culture and sing, and that’s a liberating and edifying feeling.”

Also on Sunday, six area congregations, including the Champlain Valley Unitarian Universalist Society, Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Congregational Church of Middlebury UCC, Memorial Baptist Church, St. Stephen’s on the Green and the United Methodist Church of Middlebury, will feature the music of Bach in their Sunday services.

Buettner attributes the growing success of the Festival to its ability to capture the interest of audience members on different levels.

“There is certainly a performance excitement around having a weekend of concerts, and there is also an appeal to the event to people who care and think about music and culture,” Buettner explained. “Then, simply, in attending the performances there is a beauty to the music. That’s a description of Bach’s compositions – they appeal to our intellect and they appeal to our emotions, and that’s something that we keep in mind for every festival that we plan.”

More information can be found at go/bachfest.