For Bach lovers, a suite week ahead
The Charlotte Bach festival runs through June 22 at various locations in Charlotte
The following article appeared in the June 15, 2024, edition of The Charlotte Ledger, an e-newsletter with smart and original local news for Charlotte. We offer free and paid subscription plans. More info here.
Bach Festival returns to Charlotte with performances, lectures and masterclasses focusing on the composer and his contemporaries; events geared toward both avid Bach lovers and the Bach-curious
The Charlotte Bach Festival’s closing concert at Myers Park Presbyterian Church in 2019 (shown here) featured Bach's St. Matthew Passion, in which the composer set the 26th and 27th chapters of the Gospel of Matthew to music. (Photo courtesy of Bach Akademie Charlotte)
by Cristina Bolling
One of the richest weeks in Charlotte classical music is Bach.
Some of the country’s top performers, scholars and aficionados of Johann Sebastian Bach and his contemporaries are in Charlotte this week for the fifth in-person Charlotte Bach Festival, a 9-day celebration of the Baroque-period composer who is considered to be one of the greatest musical minds in the history of Western music.
Bach Akademie Charlotte, a nonprofit devoted to musical scholarship and performance that “advances the spirit of community” through Bach’s legacy, is the organization behind the festival, which consists of more than a dozen events at venues in uptown and in other areas of Charlotte.
They range from a chance to watch a master organist give a masterclass to local organ players, an orchestral performance of Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons,” vocal and orchestral Bach performances and a cello concert.
The festival kicked off Friday and runs through June 22. Events will take place in multiple venues across Charlotte, including at Queens University, Holy Comforter Episcopal Church on Park Road and uptown at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church and the Brooklyn Collective.
The Bach Akademie Charlotte holds performances and educational programs during the year, in addition to the annual festival.
The Ledger’s Cristina Bolling caught up with Bach Akademie Charlotte Executive Director Garrett Murphy last week to hear about how the festival got started, what audiences organizers hope to reach, and to understand … why Bach?
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. Tell me about Bach festivals. How did Charlotte get one, and do they happen in other cities?
Mike Trammell, a singer who’s a native of Charlotte, had attended a couple of Bach festivals in Germany, where almost every city of any size has a Bach festival each summer centered around the music of one of Germany’s most celebrated composers and minds.
He then came back to Charlotte and had the idea with some friends: Wouldn’t it be amazing to produce something like that here? So this is an entirely independent organization that Mike founded [in 2017].
Right from the get-go, it has been ambitious, bringing in the most top-notch, world-class musicians from around North America who are experts in this genre of Baroque music.
Q. What is it about Bach and his music that inspires entire week-long festivals devoted to him — even here in Charlotte, North Carolina?
Bach is sort of — there’s something for everyone on the surface. It’s beautiful music. It’s exciting. There are parts of it that are deeply spiritual. He was a very spiritual man, and prolific, and so there’s an abundance of music that we can pull on for our audiences.
But then as the audience gets more familiar with it, there’s a lot of intricacies there — a lot of deeply meaningful things behind the music. And so we hope to not just share the notes, or perform it, but to really sort of unpack for our audience what this is all about — why they should enjoy it, why they should love it.
It is truly something that I think exists in a number of composers, but for us, this is an opportunity to experience the timeless insight into the shared human experience through this music.
Q. What will be notable about the music this week’s audiences will hear, as opposed to Bach music they might have heard previously?
We’re bringing to the region a way of playing Bach and his contemporaries that is the way that Bach intended it to sound, so we’re doing what they call “historically informed performance.”
Many of our musicians are playing on instruments from the 1700s. [Bach lived from 1685-1750.] So it’s an incredibly sort of historic scholarly practice, and at the same time, some of the most dynamic playing of this music you’ll ever hear.
At the end of the festival, we’re doing Monteverdi’s Vespers. He was an Italian baroque composer, so a contemporary of Bach, although they never met. This is one of the biggest pieces of Baroque music that we’re performing. It may be a Charlotte premiere, in its entirety.
And we’re bringing two instruments that rarely see the light of day. One is called the cornetto, or the cornetti, that is a precursor to the trumpet — there are no valves, so everything is done with your lips. It’s a real virtuosic thing, and to do it well is very rare, and we were bringing in the best in the world to do this. … And then the other instrument is called the sackbut. That is kind of a precursor to the bassoon.
Q. It seems like when some people think of classical music, they can feel a little bit intimidated, because they can’t identify a composer, or they don’t feel like they understand the genre. But it seems like your approach is trying to meet people where they are?
I will go as far as to say, I think we’re trying to create a movement in Charlotte for this music. And there is such a sophisticated audience, in many ways, a very worldly audience, in Charlotte, that we’re just opening a door for folks to really see some exciting ways of playing music that has really existed since the inception of it.
The creation of this music was not meant to be staid and sterile, but really exciting and invigorating and inspiring. And in almost a spiritual way, we’re seeking to make sure that society has access to this music in a way that can inspire an audience, and in a way that inspires us as performers.
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➡️ Want to go? The Charlotte Bach Festival runs through June 22 at various locations in Charlotte. Admission is available through an all-festival pass or a la carte tickets. All-festival passes are $250 to $350; tickets to single events range from $15 to $60. Information here.
Cristina Bolling is managing editor of The Ledger: cristina@cltledger.com
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Executive editor: Tony Mecia; Managing editor: Cristina Bolling; Staff writer: Lindsey Banks; Business manager: Brie Chrisman