Festival 2010

The Boulder Bach Festival celebrated J.S. Bach’s 325th birthday with an expanded 2009/2010 season of concerts, recitals, and lectures that paid homage to the genius of the Baroque era and his works for keyboard, instruments, and voice.

This year’s festival was rich with offerings that feature some of Bach’s most famous works along with lesser known gems that define the breadth and depth of his artistry. We were thrilled to welcome back internationally renowned harpsichordist, Jory Vinikour, who wowed last year’s audiences, for a solo recital in November. Master violinist, Krista Bennion Feeney, who left last year’s audiences breathless, returned to our festival in March as concertmaster and soloist.

To complete the complement of outstanding guest artists, the Boulder Bach Festival welcomed former principal oboist of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, Joseph Robinson, and organist Andrew Henderson from the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City. Vocal soloists were soprano MeeAe Nam, professor of voice at Eastern Michigan University, and renowned bass-baritone Nikolas Nackley.

The Festival was proud to have Tim Krueger’s musical expertise in preparing and conducting the festival chorus again this year. Timothy J. Krueger, now in his third season, is the chorus director for the Boulder Bach Festival and artistic director of St. Martin’s Chamber Choir in Denver.

Dan Seger

Dan Seger is a retired teacher from the Boulder Valley School District, who has had a lifelong love of music and passion for the works of J. S. Bach. He has sung in the Boulder Bach Festival Chorus for over 15 years and has been chorus manager for the past five. He served a term on the board of directors several years ago and returned to it in 2006. Outside of BBF, he sings in the Concert and Chamber Choirs of the Boulder Chorale, as well as in The Renaissance Project, an a capella choir of about 20 members specializing in pre-Baroque choral music. He performed on voice and recorder for more than twenty years with the Boulder Renaissance Consort, one of the pioneering early music performance groups in Boulder, and was on stage with the Rocky Mountain Revels for several seasons. In 2008 he was honored by an invitation to sing in the chorus of the Montana Early Music Festival in Helena and Missoula when they performed J. S. Bach’s St. John Passion, just a week before BBF performed the same work. Dan is also the current president of Early Music Colorado, an organization dedicated to the promotion, development, and support of informed performances of music and dance written before the Nineteenth Century.

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Dick Van Pelt

Al Lundell

Thurston Manning

Penny Anderson

Frederick M Denny

David Elm

Luis Jorge Gonzalez

Molly Hardman

Balfour Patterson

Jim Topping

Larry Worster

Larry Worster is a Professor of Music History at Metropolitan State College of Denver. He served the college for two years as Director of Student Services Technology and Assessment from 2006-2008. He taught previously at the University of Colorado, Regis College, and Denver University. He performed for ten years (1984-94) in the Irish folk ensemble Colcannon. Dr. Worster has been active in the leadership of the Rocky Mountain Chapter of the College Music Society, the Society for American Music, and the Board of Directors of the Boulder Bach Festival. He is the author of Cecil Effinger: A Colorado Composer published in 1997 by Scarecrow Press. His ChartCreator software is published as shareware at http://www.chartcreator.com. Six customized sets of ChartPlayer software for the support of general studies music textbooks have been published by McGraw-Hill. His current project working as a co-author with Jean Ferris on her textbook Music: The Art of Listening, published by McGraw-Hill. In his spare time, he teaches golf.

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Festival 2009

The main events of the 2009 Boulder Bach Festival were an organ concert, a symposium, and two large concerts that united the instrumental and choral music of the master. Timothy Krueger, Boulder Bach Festival chorus director, and Krista Bennion Feeney, violinist, led the March 13th and March 14th concerts of the March 2009 festival.

Krueger, founder and artistic director of the St. Martin’s Chamber Choir in Denver, auditioned and prepared the Boulder Bach Festival chorus for last season’s St. John Passion. This season he again prepared the chorus and conducted two choral works, Lutheran Mass No. 1 in F major and Lutheran Mass No. 2 in A major.

Feeney, the concertmaster of the Orchestra of St Luke’s and the Mostly Mozart Festival, both in New York City, served as guest concertmaster for the festival concerts and performed as soloist and leader of the instrumental works, including the Concerto for Two Violins in D minor and the Brandenburg No 3 in G major.

Staff Main Text

Below are the Boulder Bach Festival staff members.

Board Home Page

The Boulder Bach Festival is a dynamic organization which constantly reexamines its philosophies and reaffirms its commitment to its goals. The hard-working 20 member Board of Directors puts its many talents and interests to best use in working with a number of permanent and occasional ad hoc committees. Not only does this system allow for greater efficiency, it encourages maximum involvement in all aspects of the Festival and a greater awareness of growing and changing needs. The music leadership team in conjunction with the Program Committee, which is made up of board members familiar with music programming, plans programs two years in advance. Careful fiscal planning is the responsibility of the five-member Budget Committee, working closely with the Program and Fund Raising Committees and the Executive Director.

Larry Worster

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Eileen O’Neill

Glenn Ross

Eileen O’Neill

Dan Seger

Dan Seger, President and Chorus Manager
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Tim Krueger

Timothy Krueger studied musicology at the Wheaton College Conservatory, the University of Colorado-Boulder, the Universität Hamburg, Germany, and the University of London’s Royal Holloway College, England. He founded and is Artistic Director of the Denver-based professional ensemble St. Martin’s Chamber Choir, and has worked professionally with such ensembles as the Santa Fe Opera, the Santa Fe Desert Chorale, Chicago A Cappella, the Vox Early Music Ensemble (Ann Arbor), the St. John’s Cathedral Choir in Denver, and the Ars Nova Singers of Boulder. He is choirmaster of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, Denver; chorus master of the Colorado Music Festival at Chautauqua; and a part-time member of the music faculty at the Metropolitan State College of Denver, where he directs the men’s choir and teaches music history classes.

Carole Whitney

Carole Whitney, appointed executive director of the Boulder Bach Festival in March 2007, has had a thirty year career as a professional cellist. As Assistant Principal Cellist of the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, she was soloist with the orchestra and played countless chamber music performances on the symphony’s behalf. She was also an active participant in governance and leadership involving community relations, strategic planning, and educational outreach. She continues performing with the Santa Fe Opera each summer. Locally, she is the Principal Cellist for both Colorado Mahlerfest and Pro Musica Colorado, and also performs solo continuo for the Boulder Bach Festival. Other organizations she has performed with include The Metropolitan Opera, The New York City Ballet, The New York Pops, The Aspen Music Festival, The Grand Teton Music Festival, The Colorado Music Festival, and The Colorado Symphony Orchestra. Being deeply committed to experiencing the joys of classical music throughout her life has made Carole passionate about sharing her enthusiasm with audiences of all ages.

Support for the Boulder Bach Festival

The Boulder Bach Festival thanks every individual donor whose gifts make possible our annual presentations to the community.

The Boulder Bach Festival is grateful to the following foundations and agencies for their generous support.

The Scientific and Cultural Facilities District

The Boulder County Arts Alliance

The Community Foundation Serving Boulder County

Boulder Arts Commission

Additionally, we acknowledge support from:

Boulder Public Library Foundation
Matt Meeks and Moo Interactive
Call Management Products, Inc.
Johnson, Kightlinger, Graham, & Co.
BlackRock
Morrell Printing
Page Two
The Broker Inn
The Hotel Boulderado
Nesheim Cleaning Services

Program advertisements from the following businesses:

Bartlett Interiors
Steve Higgins and Edward Jones Investments
McGuckin Hardware
Niwot Market
Indochine.

Board of Directors

The Boulder Bach Festival is a dynamic organization that constantly reexamines its philosophies and reaffirms its commitment to its goals. The hard-working Board of Directors puts its many talents and interests to best use in working with a number of permanent and occasional ad hoc committees. Not only does this system allow for greater efficiency, it encourages maximum involvement in all aspects of the Festival and a greater awareness of growing and changing needs. The Program Committee, composed of board members familiar with music programming, plans programs two years in advance. Careful fiscal planning is the responsibility of the five-member Budget Committee, working closely with the Program and Fund Raising Committees and the Executive Director.

BBF Board of Directors , 2008-2009

President -
Vice President - Dick Van Pelt
Secretary - Al Lundell
Treasurer - Thurston Manning

Penny Anderson
Frederick M Denny
David Elm
Luis Jorge Gonzalez
Molly Hardman
Eileen O’Neill
Balfour Patterson
Julie Stuenkel
Larry Worster

Staff

Executive Director—Carole Whitney Bio
Chorus Director—Tim Krueger Bio
Chorus Manager—Dan Seger
Volunteer Coordinator—Eileen O’Neill
Production Manager—Glenn Ross
Larry Worster, Program Annotator

Boulder Bach Festival Has Opportunities for Kids of All Ages

In February, Boulder-area youth, ranging in age from 6 to 18 and representing as many as 40-area music teachers, played Bach on the stage of the Boulder Public Library Auditorium. This annual event, Kids for Bach, is popular with the young music students and their friends and families, and overflow audiences are typical. In January, a large number of tape recordings were submitted by aspiring 18-and-under soloists, and in early February a panel of Boulder Bach Festival’s (BBF) Education Committee members and other Boulder musicians listened to the tapes in order to select 16 performers or ensembles for each of two Kids for Bach programs. The young virtuosos performed on instruments including voice, piano, violin, viola, cello, string bass, flute, French horn, and bass clarinet. Two budding string quartets were selected, and each program has featured an ensemble of Boulder Suzuki Strings musicians and the Bear Creek Bach Bunch singers.

Another BBF children’s program, Bach for Kids, brings the music of Bach to both school-aged and younger children (recommended for ages 3 and older). For many years, Professional Storyteller Susan Marie Frontczak has been the featured guest artist on Bach for Kids, staged at the Boulder Public Library Auditorium. A researched and scripted program, entitled “Growing Up Bach,” gives children a glimpse of what it would have been like to grow up in Bach’s family, or attend the famous St. Thomas School in Leipzig. Susan Marie’s engaging narration of the story comes to life with musical examples played by BBF Music Director, Robert Spillman, on the piano and harpsichord, and vocalist accompanists.

Dates of the BBF children’s programs for the coming season are: Kids for Bach, Sunday, February 7, 2010, at 2 and 4 p.m. at the Boulder Public Library Auditorium; and Bach for Kids, Sunday, May 16, 2010, at 2 and 4 p.m., also at the Boulder Public Library Auditorium.

Boulder Bach Festival History

In the summer of 1981 a group of Boulder music lovers decided they would celebrate the life and music of the Baroque era’s most influential and inspiring composer, Johann Sebastian Bach, by organizing and presenting three concerts during the weekend of his March birth date. The Festival’s rapid progression from its hopeful beginning in March 1982 to the well-established institution of today resulted largely from the talents and determination of its founders, the financial and emotional support of its audience, and the ideas of its Board of Directors. Since that first season, the Festival has brought Bach’s magnificent music to a variety of venues, including area churches, Boulder High School, and the University of Colorado’s Grusin Music Hall and Macky Auditorium. Through the years it broadened its scope by including chamber concerts in the yearly calendar. It now also reaches out into the community with Master Classes, the Young Artists’ Competition (every few years), and special children’s concerts at the Boulder Public Library. The BBF can now claim that it has performed all of Bach’s major works, plus a large percentage of his total output of amazingly diverse compositions as well. The BBF has built a reputation for high quality performances which explore the depth and complexity of all Bach’s works.

Historical Sequence of Major Works

1982 Magnificat, BWV 243
1983 Christmas Oratorio, BWV 248
1984 St. John Passion, BWV 245
1985 St. Matthew Passion, BWV 244
1986 Easter Oratorio, BWV 249
1987 B Minor Mass, BWV 232
1988 Christmas Oratorio, BWV 248
1989 Magnificat, BWV 243
1990 St. Matthew Passion, BWV 244
1991 B Minor Mass, BWV 232
1992 St. John Passion, BWV 245
1993 Easter Oratorio, BWV 249
1994 Magnificat, BWV 243
1995 St. Matthew Passion, BWV 244
1996 Christmas Oratorio, BWV 248
1997 B Minor Mass, BWV 232
1998 Ascension Oratorio, BWV 11; Magnificat, BWV 243
1999 St. John Passion, BWV 245
2000 St. Matthew Passion, BWV 244
2001 St. Mark Passion, BWV 247
2002 B Minor Mass, BWV 232
2003 St. Matthew Passion
2004 Christmas Oratorio, Parts I,II,III, BWV 248; Magnificat, BWV 243
2005 B Minor Mass, BWV 232
2006 St. Matthew Passion, BWV 244
2007 St. Matthew Passion, BWV 243, and Easter Oratorio, BWV 249
2008 St John Passion, BWV 245
2009 Missa in F major, “Lutheran Mass,” BWV 233 and Missa in A major, “Lutheran Mass,” BWV 234

2007 Program Notes

by Larry Worster

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)

At the time of Johann Sebastian Bach’s birth in Eisenach, the region of Thuringia in central Germany was a part of the Holy Roman Empire, a loose federation of cities and small states that encompassed Germany, Austria, Switzerland, northern Italy, and parts of Poland and Czechoslovakia. Within this region, musicians found employment in many functions: Stadtpfeifers performed music for civic functions; organists provided accompaniment for church services, tested new organs, and often improvised preludes and other incidental music as necessary; Kapellmeisters oversaw the chapels in the princely courts, selecting and training performers and composing such music as the court demanded for both entertainment and worship; and Kantors undertook responsibility for the musical education and often all other musical activities in a city.

Bach’s family included musicians employed in nearly all of these capacities. His older brother Johann Christoph, a church organist, gave Sebastian his first keyboard lessons after he took responsibility for the child following their father’s death in 1695. Sebastian spent the years 1700-02 in the north of Germany at the Michaelis School of Lüneburg, where he first learned the arts of musical composition and organ playing. After returning to the south, he received his first steady employment as an organist at the St. Blasius Church at Mühlhausen, during which time he composed his earliest cantatas.

From 1708-17, Bach was employed as a chamber musician, concertmaster, and organist at the court of the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, who encouraged him to write organ music and cantatas. When the duke refused to consider Bach for the position of Kapellmeister in 1717, the composer secured a similar post in the service of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Köthen. The young prince was a skilled player of the violin, the bass viol, and harpsichord and employed eighteen instrumentalists at his court. The situation was advantageous for the composition of secular entertainment. During the six years that he spent at Köthen, Bach produced large amounts of orchestral, chamber, and harpsichord music, including the Brandenburg Concerti, keyboard inventions, concerto transcriptions, suites, and the first volume of the Well-Tempered Clavier (pub. 1722).

Bach was one of many musicians who applied in 1723 for the post of Kantor at the St. Thomas School in Leipzig, which included responsibility for both civic music and all of the music for the city’s four largest churches. When Georg Philipp Telemann, the best-known German musician at that time, declined the position, Bach was hired to the job he would hold until his death. Later, he accepted the post of director of the collegium musicum, an amateur society founded by Telemann in 1702 that presented public concerts of secular music. During his twenty-three years of service to the city of Leipzig, he wrote hundreds of cantatas, at least five Passions, several Masses, three oratorios, and a large amount of instrumental music, including most of his published didactic keyboard music.

After Bach’s death in 1750, his manuscripts, most of which were unpublished, passed into the hands of his sons and widow. Changes in musical taste toward the end of his life left his work unappreciated. As Johann Adolph Scheibe noted in 1737, “This man would be the admiration of whole nations if he . . . did not take away the natural element in his pieces by giving them a turgid and confused style, if he did not darken their beauty with an excess of art.” Composers in Europe, if they knew of him at all, knew only his half dozen or so published keyboard works.

But Baron von Swieten introduced Viennese circles to Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier in the second half of the eighteenth century, and both Mozart and Beethoven studied his fugal style. Felix Mendelssohn’s performance of the St. Matthew Passion at the Berlin Singakademie in 1829 was the first of many nineteenth-century revivals of Bach’s choral works. Most nineteenth-century performances of Bach’s choral works emphasized large performing groups; Mendelssohn’s choir for the St. Matthew Passion was around 160, at least five times the total number of singers available to Bach at the Thomaskirche. The formation of the Bach-Gesellschaft (Bach Society) in 1850 eventually led to the publication of the first complete edition of Bach’s works and the first critical biography by Philipp Spitta. Since the 1950s, an increasing number of performing organizations, among them the Boulder Bach Festival, have concentrated on producing historically informed performances using period instruments when possible, appropriately sized forces, and conducted as Bach would have, either from the harpsichord or the violin.

Friday, January 19, 2007, 7:30 p.m.
First United Methodist Church
1421 Spruce Street, Boulder

The Concerto

Bach’s concerti may be grouped by his place of employment. He first began studying the concerto during his service to Duke of Weimar (1708-17) by transcribing concertos of other composers into works for solo harpsichord or organ. The transformed works were most likely performed for courtly entertainment. Among the pieces arranged were at least three concertos from Vivaldi’s L’estro armonico (1711) as well as works by young Duke Johann Ernst and other minor German composers. Although these works are not original, through the process of transcription Bach learned the features of the Italian concerto and the concertato style that dominated his later works. During his service at Köthen, he began writing original concerti, and many of these are concerti grossi, featuring a small group of soloists, known as the concertino, rather than a single instrument.

The third period of Bach’s development began in 1729 when he became director of the collegium musicum of Leipzig, a position he held nearly continuously until 1741. This organization comprised students, town musicians, amateurs, and culturally-minded citizens who gathered once a week to hold concerts in the popular coffee houses and gardens of Leipzig. No programs of the collegium have ever been found, but during this time Bach transcribed many of his Köthen concerti, as well as works by other composers, into concerti for one to four harpsichords.

Understandably, Bach’s concerti show influences from Vivaldi’s works, the most obvious being their three-movement form. Additionally, outer movements are structured as a concertato dialogue between the ripieno (the whole orchestra) and the soloist(s). Ritornello form, in which a ritornello theme opens and closes each movement as well as setting off the soloist’s episodes, is usually present in these movements. Since the soloist’s episodes may not be thematically related, the ritornello serves as a unifying force. While the virtuosic skills of the soloists are always aptly displayed in the first movement, and expressly highlighted in the third movement, the middle movements often contain expressive cantabile melodies.

The harpsichord concertos of Johann Sebastian Bach are of great significance in the history of European art music; however, their importance does not lie in their musical content as much as in Bach’s choice of the harpsichord as a solo instrument. For Bach, the compositions were but a small part of the many works that he produced to fulfill the demands of his employment. As passed on to the next generation of composers through the hands of his sons Carl Philipp Emanuel and Johann Christian, the concept of the keyboard concerto initiated a new genre of composition that became a favorite of the composers of the Viennese Classical School.

Sacred Vocal Works

Sacred German dramatic music of the 1700s, as epitomized by the works of Bach, is one of many forms of music influenced by the musical innovations that occurred in northern Italy nearly a century earlier. Bach’s sacred works are characterized by a common set of elements: movements dominated by a single musical idea or Affekt; a mixture of Biblical text and newly authored poetry; and the selection of instruments appropriate to either the text or the occasion for which the work was composed. Bach’s passions, although stylistically similar to his cantatas, are larger works that tell the story of Christ’s crucifixion. A brief historical introduction will provide the perspective necessary to fully appreciate these works.

From the late 1500s, groups of Italian scholars of classical Greek culture began to decry the predominant renaissance forms of a cappella polyphonic music: the mass, motet, chanson, and madrigal. In their place, they proposed a new type of vocal setting called monody, in which a solo vocal part would be supported by unobtrusive accompaniment. In such music, they argued, the melody would be freed to recapture expressive power described by Plato and Aristotle. With the advent of the dramatic monodic style came the birth of recitative and aria that enabled the creation of opera, oratorio, and cantata. Early cantatas were largely secular and, as seen in the more than 600 cantatas of Alessandro Scarlatti (1660-1725), often comprised little more than two recitatives followed by arias.

A second Italian innovation that affected the development of the cantata was the principle of concertato, or concerted music, in which contrasting solo, choral, and instrumental sections are placed side by side in a single movement. The use of concertato effects is extremely striking in the compositions of Andrea Gabrieli and his nephew Giovanni, organists at the Church of St. Mark in Venice from 1566 to 1612. The unusual physical design of St. Mark’s, featuring multiple choir lofts, was especially conducive to sectional contrasts in dynamics, instrumentation, and spatial separation. Although this principle is a familiar feature of the concerto in which an instrument or small group of instruments is contrasted with the tutti or whole orchestra, early Baroque music labeled “concerto” was usually church music for voices and instruments. This style of music was common in Germanic lands, and most of Bach’s predecessors wrote sacred concertos. Bach’s sacred dramatic music differs from its Italian relatives by the incorporation of numerous choruses and the variety of texts: sections of the Bible, Psalms, expressive poetic texts, and the texts of chorales (Lutheran hymns). The personal nature of the inserted texts brings the worshippers into the drama, projecting both the individual’s meditations as arias and the congregation’s reactions as chorales.

While cantatas were a regular feature of the Lutheran Sunday service, oratorios and passions were composed for the special days of Good Friday, Christmas, and Ascension Day. The passions, because they tell the story of Christ’s death, are Bach’s largest creations in this style. Although he created two passions using the gospel of John, and one each using the texts of Matthew, Luke, and Mark, only one St. John Passion and the St. Matthew Passion have survived in their entirety. Although sacred works in Latin form a smaller part of the composer’s output, they are some of his most significant works and include the Magnificat and B minor Mass, as well as his four Latin motets.

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)

At the time of Johann Sebastian Bach’s birth in Eisenach, the region of Thuringia in central Germany was a part of the Holy Roman Empire, a loose federation of cities and small states that encompassed Germany, Austria, Switzerland, northern Italy, and parts of Poland and Czechoslovakia. Within this region, musicians found employment in many functions: Stadtpfeifers performed music for civic functions; organists provided accompaniment for church services, improvising preludes and other incidental music as necessary and testing new organs; Kapellmeisters oversaw the chapels in the princely courts, selecting and training performers and composing such music as the court demanded for both entertainment and worship; and Kantors undertook responsibility for the musical education and often all other musical activities in a city.

Bach was one of many musicians who applied in 1723 for the post of Kantor at the St. Thomas School in Leipzig, which included responsibility for both civic music and all of the music for the city’s four largest churches. When Georg Philipp Telemann, the best-known German musician at that time, declined the position, Bach was hired to the job he would hold until his death. Later, he accepted the post of director of the collegium musicum, an amateur society founded by Telemann in 1702 that presented public concerts of secular music. During his twenty-three years of service to the city of Leipzig, he wrote hundreds of cantatas, at least five passions, several masses, three oratorios, and a large amount of instrumental music, including most of his published didactic keyboard music.

After Bach’s death in 1750, his manuscripts, most of which were unpublished, passed into the hands of his sons and widow. Changes in musical taste toward the end of his life left his work unappreciated. As Johann Adolph Scheibe noted in 1737, “This man would be the admiration of whole nations if he…did not take away the natural element in his pieces by giving them a turgid and confused style, if he did not darken their beauty with an excess of art.” Composers in Europe, if they knew of him at all, knew only his half dozen or so published keyboard works.

It was Baron von Swieten who introduced Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier to Viennese music circles in the second half of the eighteenth century, and both Mozart and Beethoven studied his fugal style. Felix Mendelssohn’s performance of the St. Matthew Passion at the Berlin Singakademie in 1829 was the first of many nineteenth-century revivals of Bach’s choral works. Most nineteenth-century performances of Bach’s choral works emphasized large performing groups; Mendelssohn’s choir for the St. Matthew Passion was around 160, at least five times the total number of singers available to Bach at the Thomaskirche. The formation of the Bach-Gesellschaft (Bach Society) in 1850 eventually led to the publication of the first complete edition of Bach’s works and the first critical biography by Philipp Spitta in 1889. Since the 1950s, an increasing number of performing organizations, among them the Boulder Bach Festival, have concentrated on producing historically informed performances using period instruments when possible, appropriately sized forces, and conducted as Bach would have, either from the harpsichord or the violin.

The Concerto

Sacred Vocal Works

While cantatas were a regular feature of the Lutheran Sunday service, oratorios and passions were composed for the special days of Good Friday, Christmas, and Ascension Day. The passions, because they tell the story of Christ’s death, are Bach’s largest creations in this style. Although he created two passions using the gospel of John, and one each using the texts of Matthew, Luke, and Mark, only one St. John Passion and the St. Matthew Passion have survived in their entirety. Sacred works in Latin form a smaller part of the composer’s output; the most significant of these works are the Magnificat, the B minor Mass, and the four short masses, or missae breves, listed in the list of his complete works as originating from 1738-39 and stemming from adaptations of previously composed works.

About the Festival

The Boulder Bach Festival was founded in 1981 to present the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and to encourage knowledge and appreciation of the Baroque master. Since 1982 a multi-day festival has been presented each year, featuring a local professional orchestra, volunteer chorus, and nationally known soloists. Over the years it has gradually added concerts outside of its original format so that presentations now extend through most of the year. Lecture series, master classes, youth competitions, and an enrichment program for local elementary schools add to the Festival’s educational aspect.