Saturday, April 28, 2012 at 8pm
“How Does Bach Do It?” ~ The “Wedding” Cantata and Orchestral Suite #3
Jeremy Yudkin, Professor of Music, Boston University
Cambridge Concentus, with Clara Rottsolk, soprano
Allen Theatre at Berkshire School
245 N Undermountain Road, Sheffield, MA
Tickets: $25 // $20 for BBS Members and OLLI Members
$20 for Berkshire School Parents
Berkshire School Grandparents and Staff
All Students Free (college students free with ID)
Tickets available at the door.
Advance tickets (recommended) at BrownPaperTickets.com
The Berkshire Bach Society has created a special event which takes us to the heart of the genius of Johann Sebastian Bach. The program presents two of the most popular pieces Bach ever wrote, the delightful Wedding Cantata and the brilliant Orchestral Suite No. 3, and turns them into a multi-media evening that will be intriguing, informative, and artistically delightful.
First, our guest musicologist and Boston University professor, Jeremy Yudkin, unravels the intricacies and complexities of Bach’s compositional process and elucidates those strategies and attributes that make the music of Bach unique. Yudkin examines these two extraordinary masterpieces in detail with visuals and with musical examples for his explanations, each one demonstrated by the early music ensemble, Cambridge Concentus, and soprano Clara Rottsolk, all consummate experts in the performance of the works of Bach.
With this as prelude, the concert performance of these great works follows, bringing a new – or renewed – appreciation for the genius of Bach.
Don’t miss this special event on Saturday, April 28th at 8PM at the newly renovated Allen Theater on the Berkshire School campus, just five minutes south of South Egremont on Route 41.
Professor Jeremy Yudkin is Chair of the Department of Musicology and Ethnomusicology and Professor of Music at Boston University. He also serves as Affiliated Faculty of the Department of Judaic Studies and Associated Faculty of the Department of African American Studies. He has taught as Visiting Professor at Harvard University and Professeur Invité at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique in Paris, France. He is the recipient of a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation Fellowship, a Class of 1960 Visiting Scholar at Williams College, a Fellowship at the Boston University Humanities Foundation, and a Research Fellowship from the Camargo Foundation. He served as Visiting Professor of Music at Oxford University from 2006 to 2010. He is the author of eight books and an award-winning instructional video on the orchestra. Professor Yudkin’s principal fields of research include medieval music, early Beethoven, jazz, Bartok, and the Beatles. Every summer in the Berkshires he is the Pre-Concert Lecturer for the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood.
The Boston-based ensemble Cambridge Concentus performs the vocal and orchestral repertoire of the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Its members feel that the performance of this music, despite being such a standard part of our repertoire, warrants a less standard approach. The performers of Cambridge Concentus are drawn from a new generation of early-music musicians committed to infusing recent scholarship with an energetic performance style. It is with this performance ideal that the ensemble performs the classic seventeenth and eighteenth-century works to critical acclaim. The Musical Intelligencer recently wrote: “this concert will emblazon Cambridge Concentus in my mind,” while another lauded: “the lightness of playing once again caught me off-guard. Wonderful!” Cambridge Concentus, under the direction of their co-artistic advisor Joshua Rifkin, recently embarked upon a four-concert tour of Japan where a critic hailed their rendering of J. S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion as “an epoch-making performance.”
Click here for soprano Clara Rottsolk’s bio.