BACHtoberfest Weekend

BIOS

Click here for bios of the CONCORA Singers

Baroklyn Musicians

American pianist SIMONE DINNERSTEIN has a distinctive musical voice. The Washington Post has called her “an artist of strikingly original ideas and irrefutable integrity.” She first came to wider public attention in 2007 through her recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, reflecting an aesthetic that was both deeply rooted in the score and profoundly idiosyncratic. She is, wrote The New York Times, “a unique voice in the forest of Bach interpretation.”

Dinnerstein has played with orchestras ranging from the New York Philharmonic and Montreal Symphony Orchestra to the London Symphony Orchestra and the Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale Rai. She has performed in venues from Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center to the Berlin Philharmonie, the Vienna Konzerthaus, Seoul Arts Center and Sydney Opera House. She has made fifteen albums, all of which have topped the Billboard classical charts. Her first fourteen albums were recorded with Grammy Award-winning producer Adam Abeshouse. During the pandemic she recorded three albums which form a trilogy: A Character of Quiet, An American Mosaic, and Undersong. An American Mosaic was nominated for a Grammy. Her most recent recording, Complicité (Supertrain Records, 2025), is her first all-Bach album in over ten years and features Jennifer Johnson Cano, mezzo-soprano and Peggy Pearson, oboe d’amore along with the string ensemble Simone founded and directs, Baroklyn. Recorded with producer Silas Brown, the album also includes composer Philip Lasser’s continuo realizations and recomposition of Bach’s Air on the G String.

In recent years, Dinnerstein has created projects that express her broad musical interests. She gave the world premiere of The Eye Is the First Circle at Montclair State University, the first multi-media production she conceived, created, and directed, which uses as source materials her father Simon Dinnerstein’s painting The Fulbright Triptych and Charles Ives’s Concord Sonata. She premiered Richard Danielpour’s An American Mosaic, a tribute to those affected by the pandemic, in a performance on multiple pianos throughout Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. Following her recording, Mozart in Havana, she brought the Havana Lyceum Orchestra from Cuba to the U.S. for the first time, performing eleven concerts. Philip Glass composed his Piano Concerto No. 3 for her, co-commissioned by twelve orchestras. Working with Renée Fleming and the Emerson String Quartet, she premiered André Previn and Tom Stoppard’s Penelope at the Tanglewood, Ravinia and Aspen music festivals, and performed it at Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, and presented by LA Opera and the Cleveland Orchestra.

The Washington Post comments, “it is Dinnerstein’s unreserved identification with every note she plays that makes her performance so spellbinding.” In a world where music is everywhere, she hopes that it can still be transformative.

Simone Dinnerstein describes BAROKLYN as “a group of string players which I lead from the piano. We’re a community that shares the artistic vision that is most important to me, that music should be creative and new. Rehearsal is important to us, and I’ve been influenced by theater practice in which we listen to each other and pass musical ideas and phrases within the group. We rehearse and perform in a semi-circle around the piano and I rearrange parts to emphasize lines, voices and imitative qualities to create a sense of dialogue. I often work with the composer Philip Lasser who makes continuo parts in his contemporary idiom.

The members of Baroklyn are predominantly female, although not exclusively! That’s a reflection of the fact that they are outstanding musicians who I discovered and brought together through networks of friendship. We have recently recorded Complicité, an album consisting of works by Bach with a twist.”

Since its founding in 1974, CONCORA has held a unique place in the arts community as Connecticut’s first professional choir, and has built a reputation for artistic excellence throughout New England. They sing a wide variety of repertoire, from the Renaissance to commissioned works. The choir has long had a special relationship with the music of J.S. Bach; in addition to performing all of Bach’s major choral works in recent years, it gave the 2021 world premiere of the Prayer in B Minor, a Hebrew version of Bach’s B Minor Mass. In conjunction with Music Worcester, CONCORA is a major partner in THE COMPLETE BACH from 2024 to 2035, the first project in America to present everything that Bach ever wrote. Under the leadership of Artistic Director Chris Shepard, the choir has deepened its commitment to socially-conscious programming over the past decade, particularly in its MUSIC WITH A MISSION collaborations with Asylum Hill Congregational Church. They have presented Considering Matthew Shepard with the UCONN Chamber Choir, Geoffrey Hudson’s Passion for the Planet, Reena Esmail’s This Love Between Us, and Edward Tyler’s An American Requiem, as well as retrospective concerts honoring the legacy of Black composers Margaret Bonds and Moses Hogan. CONCORA’S singers are drawn from throughout New England. Each is a trained singer, and although they represent many professional fields—from teachers, composers, and conductors to speech pathologists, ministers, and lawyers—together they share an abiding love for choral music and a desire to serve their community through singing.

JENNIFER JOHNSON CANO’s portrayal of Michele in the recent premiere of The Righteous at Santa Fe Opera earned her accolades from The New York Times, which noted how she “voluptuously captured” the pain and strength of her character; Musical America called her a “standout” and The Wall Street Journal described her as “riveting.” Opera Today noted her “substantial, creamy mezzo-soprano” and called Ms. Cano’s arias in The Righteous “flawless combinations of radiant, poised, attractive singing invested with heartfelt delivery.” Opera News has described her as a “matchless interpreter of contemporary opera.”

After creating the role of Michele in the world premiere of Gregory Spears’s The Righteous with Santa Fe Opera in summer 2024, she was invited back to sing the role of Mrs. Grose in Britten’s The Turn of the Screw as well as Schwertleite in Wagner’s Die Walküre in summer of 2025. Her 2025-2026 season includes engagements with the Chicago Symphony, the San Francisco Symphony, the Colorado Symphony, the Seattle Symphony and The Apollo Orchestra in repertoire by a wide variety of composers. The Philadelphia Chamber Music Society presents Ms. Cano in recital with pianist Christopher Cano and violist Beth Guterman Chu. Tours include a project with Simone Dinnerstein and her ensemble Baroklyn (following Ms. Cano’s appearance on Complicité, Ms. Dinnerstein’s 2025 recording on Supertrain Records) as well as a week with the National Symphony Orchestra of Taiwan’s chamber music festival in January. Ms. Cano returns to the MET Opera in her role debut as Suzuki in Madama Butterfly, which will include the singer’s 150th performance at the MET. She and Christopher will also premiere a new song cycle by Gregory Spears at the Tucson Desert Song Festival.

Flutist CHRISTINA JENNINGS relishes an artistic life comprised of sharing music with audiences and students. The winner of several major competitions – including the Concert Artists Guild and National Flute Association competitions—she has appeared as concerto soloists with over 50 orchestras. A passionate teacher, Jennings is professor of flute at the University of Colorado Boulder, where her flute studio is one of the most prominent and respected flute studios in the United States. Dedicated to training the whole flutist, her students have gone on to meaningful work in orchestras, schools, nonprofit arts organizations, and careers in medicine, law and climate reform.

KATHERINE NEEDLEMAN joined the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra as principal oboist in 2003, the same year she won first prize at the International Double Reed Society’s Gillet-Fox Competition. As soloist, she has appeared with the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Albany Symphony, the Richmond Symphony, the Concerto Soloists Chamber Orchestra, the Haddonfield Symphony, the Baltimore Chamber Orchestra, and the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional de Colombia, in addition to her frequent appearances with the Baltimore Symphony. She has performed as guest principal oboist with the New York Philharmonic, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, and the symphony orchestras of Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, New Zealand, and San Diego.

Devoted to the music of our time, Ms. Needleman has premiered numerous works and has commissioned works by Luis Prado, Chia-Yu Hsu and David Ludwig, including his Pleaides which she recorded on the GENUIN label with pianist Jennifer Lim in their album, Duos for Oboe and Piano. She gave the American premiere of Ruth Gipps’ Oboe Concerto with the Richmond Symphony and Valentina Peleggi, conducted and played the American premiere of Brenno Blauth’s Concertino with the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, and gave the West Coast premiere of Christopher Rouse’s Oboe Concerto at the Cabrillo Festival with Marin Alsop conducting. She gave the premiere of Kevin Puts’ oboe concerto, Moonlight, at the Baltimore Symphony’s New Music Festival with Marin Alsop, and has recorded the work for Naxos.
A Baltimore native, Ms. Needleman attended high school at the Baltimore School for the Arts but left early to attend the Curtis Institute of Music. She served on the faculty at the Peabody Conservatory of the Johns Hopkins University for fifteen years and is currently on faculty at the Curtis Institute of Music.

PROGRAM NOTES

These notes are adapted from Simone Dinnerstein’s own liner notes for Baroklyn’s first recording, COMPLICITÉ, released in 2025, including her reflections on the creative process that led to the final versions of many of these works.

Complicité is a term that I first heard from my son, who studied the teachings of the French theatre practitioner, Jacques Lecoq. Three important ideas that Lecoq communicated to his students were le jeu (playfulness), complicité (togetherness), and disponsibilité (openness). I was so intrigued by these ideas, and the different exercises that my son learned in order to cultivate these skills within ensemble acting, that I decided to try a Lecoq approach with my own musical ensemble, Baroklyn.
Baroklyn is a string ensemble that I direct from the keyboard. All of the musicians are wonderful collaborators, with years of experience playing chamber music. They are able to listen to how I imagine each piece of music and to use all of their own creativity to help bring that vision to life. Another aspect of the Lecoq approach is that it cannot be rushed. We are lucky enough to have plenty of rehearsal time, which enables us to explore many different ways of playing.

I’m very interested in irregularities within Bach’s music. There is so much variation in his writing, and each voice is saying something slightly different, yet all of the voices are speaking simultaneously. It is dense music to play and dense to hear. My biggest goal is to be able to communicate and hear those different voices, through differentiation of timbre, agogic distortion of rhythms, ebb and flow of tempo, and emphasis on the moments of expressive intervallic leaps and harmonic dissonances that jump out from the page.

With this in mind, Baroklyn and I experiment with rearranging some of the string distributions, playing with the idea of passing musical ideas to each other, and mixing up the music stands so that players of different voices are standing next to each other. We avoid ‘fixing’ our interpretations, to keep the music from becoming static. We have a plan, but are open to the moment. This way of making music is dependent upon listening, openness to change, and trust. It results in a feeling of togetherness.

In designing this program, I thought about Bach’s writing for the voice. All of the music here is related to that, either directly or indirectly. One of the most remarkable aspects of Bach’s writing for any instrument is that each voice, meaning each musical line, can be sung. The modern musical paradigm of the singer with a backup band doesn’t exist in Bach’s music. Every line is important. However, it is impossible for us to decipher all of those voices if we don’t balance between them. The give and take is happening all the time, as opposed to establishing one hierarchy of voices that remains constant over an entire song.

We begin with our arrangement of the chorale prelude, Herr Gott, nun schleuß den Himmel auf. I was first introduced to this chorale prelude when my friend Alan Fletcher wrote a beautiful arrangement of it for the oboist Peggy Pearson and me. Peggy and I decided to include some other musician friends in our first performance of it, and that gave me the idea to arrange it for Baroklyn. We continued to experiment with many different ways of distributing the voices between us. I always played the running notes and the bass line, but we tried using one instrument to a part for the chorale, one cellist playing pizzicato, the oboe weaving in and out of the texture, and our fabulous concertmaster, Rebecca Fischer, playing two voices together as double stops. We tried playing it slowly, with depth and legato. We tried playing it more quickly to hear the lightness and hope come through the dark murmuring of the keyboard’s right hand. In the end, we decided to play the entire piece twice, first in a slower and more sustained way and then repeating it with more freedom, gradually picking up the pace as we went, like a moving force gathering momentum.

I see that chorale prelude as truly preluding the concerto that comes after it: Bach’s Keyboard Concerto in E Major, BWV 1053, which is taken from two cantatas that he had already written. It was not uncommon for him to recycle material, and it’s always interesting to see the choices that he made regarding what he kept and what he left out. The first and second movements of the concerto are from Gott soll allein mein Herze haben, BWV 169. The first movement closely follows the opening instrumental sinfonia of the cantata, with the keyboard replicating the organ. The second movement is a reworking of the alto aria Stirb in mir, Welt. The keyboard is a type of amalgam of the alto and the organ, with some very unusual harmonic differences between the cantata and the concerto. The third movement is another reimagining of a sinfonia, this time from Ich geh und suche mit Verlangen, BWV 49.

Of course, not only did Bach reimagine his own music in creating this concerto, but we musicians are reimagining it further by playing it with a piano and modern string instruments. The piano’s ability to sustain, for example, enabled us to take a slower tempo in the second movement. That movement has outer sections which give the primary melodic material to the strings, and then a rather bare central section where the cellos and bass stop playing and a highly expressive aria is given to the keyboard. The violins and violas have a very long period of acting almost as a Greek chorus to the piano’s monologue. Each chordal interjection by the strings reflects the temperament of the piano’s expression at that moment. We regarded this section as an improvisation in which everyone participated.

The chorale Der Leibzwar in der Erden from Cantata 161 was originally sung by a choir doubled by strings, as well as an obligato played by flutes or recorders. In our version, the strings are playing without the choir, with oboe and piano playing the obligato. During the rehearsal at our recording session, I asked the lower strings to try playing by themselves, in order to work on creating a certain type of blend in their sound and a longline to the phrasing. As they played, the upper strings started to join in and they ended by playing the whole chorale together. It sounded so beautiful that in the post-production of the album, I decided to link that rehearsal version to the version with obligato. I love how the process of creating became the creation itself.

This chorale is again acting as a prelude, leading into the strikingly beautiful and oddly contemporary cantata Vergnügte Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust. The first aria is so rich and full bodied, that I imagined a different type of realization of the continuo part that would give it yet another layer of depth, especially since I am playing the organ part on a piano. I asked the composer, and my longtime collaborator and friend, Philip Lasser, if he would consider writing it. It is a continuo realization in that it follows the harmonies that Bach delineated, but Philip turns it into another contrapuntal line that sometimes surprises us and shifts the music in a slightly different direction. There’s one moment before the very final words that Jennifer sings, when Philip’s realization of Bach’s writing was so contemporary that I eliminated the cello/bass for two bars just to emphasize the almost Sondheim-like piano writing of that moment.

The second aria, Wie jammern mich doch die verkehrten Herzen, is completely strange and unexpected. Bach eliminates the bass line, which is truly shocking. We are literally ungrounded. The keyboard’s right and left hands are both in the vocal range of the mezzo-soprano, and they are both highly chromatic and melismatic, winding this way and that with the most extraordinarily dissonant intervals outlined. The first and second violin parts, as well as the viola, are all playing in unison for the entire movement. Yet another shock. And amidst all of this, the singer is nested within these three independent voices of the keyboard’s right and left hands and the unison strings. She is singing in the exact same range of notes, as if a cat’s cradle has been formed around her voice.

In the Air, the final work on the program, originates from the Air on the G String from Bach’s third Orchestral Suite. This is one of his most popular works today and is almost like a vocalise, a song without words. Again, I asked Philip Lasser if he might write a continuo realization for me. However, this time I envisioned it as an independent piece of music, like a jazz improvisation, that would happen simultaneously with the performance of the original air by the strings. What Philip wrote is truly a striking composition on its own, and it acts as a lens through which we see Bach’s music in a new light. This composition feels like a new medium – one piece of music inside another.

The following notes, about the works sung by CONCORA, are by their Artistic Director, Chris Shepard.

What a thrill for us to be a part of this unfolding musical journey by one of the world’s greatest performers of Bach’s music! Until a few years ago, I would have said “Bach’s keyboard music”, but since forming Baroklyn, Simone Dinnerstein has branched out far beyond that narrower tranche of Bach’s output, wading firmly into the waters of Bach’s vocal music. As a choral conductor myself, I’m hardly surprised: once a musician encounters this repertoire, there is no turning back. In fact, in moving forward, Simone is stepping firmly into a new territory by making her conducting debut with CONCORA in this evening’s concert. I couldn’t be more excited to see where all of this will lead; I think that Simone is a uniquely insightful and incisive interpreter of Bach’s music, and I know that she has much to teach all of us as she plumbs the depth of this repertoire with her keen and probing Bach mind.

If there is any such thing as a “typical” Bach cantata, then BWV9 would be it. The work has its roots in Bach’s second church-year in Leipzig, when the vast majority of the cantatas that he wrote for each Sunday were based on a Lutheran chorale. In these works, the structure was surprisingly predictable: the opening movement used the chorale melody, often in long notes in the soprano part, with shorter phrases underneath it in the other voices. This structure was buttressed by an orchestral part that, though related to the chorale melody, was freshly composed and used an Italianate ritornello to create new musical material as a foundation for the chorale. These second-year cantatas ended with a straightforward chordal harmonization of the same hymn tune featured in the first movement. For the inner movements, Bach often alternated recitatives with arias or duets. In these, the librettist explored the theological themes of the day’s bible readings almost as a mini-sermon; Bach, the great musical preacher, could be counted on to further explicate these themes through the use of musical rhetoric.

Although BWV9 was composed in 1732, its libretto is from that second-year 1724-25 cycle, so it follows that same broad outline. Bach creates even more structural coherence by having the baritone sing all three of the recitatives, which deal with the theme of the individual’s inability to fulfill God’s law through their own strength. The other theme, explored in the aria and duet, highlights one of the most important facets of Lutheran theology: that we can only achieve salvation through faith, not through our own good works. The tenor aria illustrates the abyss that our sinfulness creates in two ways: the heavy instrumental writing, with the descending violin line and ponderous continuo part; and the extraordinarily low tenor range, drawing a parallel to our own helplessness when we try to rely on our own strength. But as often happened in Bach’s cantatas, there is a progression from spiritual thorniness to resolution as the cantata advances, and we certainly see that resolution in the beautiful duet for soprano and alto with the single flute and oboe d’amore. In this movement, as well as in the strikingly similar instrumental contour of the opening chorus, we might think of the running 16th notes as representing the help of the Holy Spirit—the equivalent of faith, rather than good works. We so often see this musical figure in movements discussing the holy spirit in Bach’s music, so we can extrapolate the same meaning for this text as well.

As a counterbalance to the tripartite Keyboard Concerto in the first part of the program, we also present a triptych of movements from Bach’s cantatas. This is a reminder of just how rich and varied the “Bach archive” is—a mini-universe of vocal and instrumental colors. The first chorale-prelude is like the opening movement of BWV9, with the chorale melody in long notes in the soprano. In contrast, the shorter middle movement presents the chorale in more traditional block harmony, though the phrases are punctuated by gloriously swirling instrumental writing, perhaps again representing the holy spirit’s role as the agent of God’s grace. The set closes with one of Bach’s most joyous choral movements, the final movement from an early cantata from Weimar, written for Palm Sunday in 1714. The gigue-like rhythm evocatively captures the excitement of the text: “Then let us go into the Salem of joy”.

BIO

PETER EDWIN KRASINSKI is broadly recognized as a motivating consultant for the pipe organ community, and as a conductor, organist and music educator, whose imaginative and energetic performances elevate and inform audiences. Well respected in both secular and sacred genres of his field, he has taught the enchantment of music to both public and private institutions in the greater Boston area for many years. His silent film performances have been hailed in the press as “a great marriage of movie and music.”

Specializing in the art of live silent film accompaniment, worldwide, some of his many appearances have included such venues as The Schermerhorn Symphony Center, (Nashville), Riverside Church, (NYC), Coral Ridge, (Fort Lauderdale), Irvine Auditorium, (University of Pennsylvania), Trinity Wall Street (NYC), Wanamaker’s-Macy’s Greek Hall (Philadelphia), St Joseph’s Cathedral (Hartford), Old South Church (Boston), National City Christian Church (Washington, DC), St Joseph’s Oratory (Montreal), The Kotzschmar Organ, (Portland), The Great Organ at Methuen Music Hall, and major concert halls in the cities of Yokohama, Fukui, Miyazaki and Kanazawa, Japan as part of seven tours in that country.

A multiple prize-winner, he is the recipient of the First Prize in Improvisation from the American Guild of Organists National Competition. A seasoned performer, he has played recitals at Notre-Dame Cathedral (Paris), the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, (Los Angeles), Holy Name Cathedral, (Chicago) and Mikael Agricola Church, (Helsinki).

Past Dean of the Boston Chapter AGO, Mr. Krasinski is a member of the Screen Actors Guild, is credited as organist and choir leader in the film The Holdovers, and was a vital contributor towards establishing an accurate portrayal for director Alexander Payne. He is Principal Organist at Mechanics Hall, Worcester, House Organist at the Providence Performing Arts Center, Organist at the Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, Mission Church, Boston, and the First Church of Christ, Scientist in Providence RI as well as accompanist at Beth El Temple Center, Belmont. A distinguished pedagogue, he recently presented Master Classes at the Sibelius Academy, Helsinki, Finland. He holds both a Bachelor of Music Degree in Music Education and Organ Performance, and the Master of Sacred Music Degree from Boston University.

BIOS

American pianist SIMONE DINNERSTEIN has a distinctive musical voice. The Washington Post has called her “an artist of strikingly original ideas and irrefutable integrity.” She first came to wider public attention in 2007 through her recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, reflecting an aesthetic that was both deeply rooted in the score and profoundly idiosyncratic. She is, wrote The New York Times, “a unique voice in the forest of Bach interpretation.”

Dinnerstein has played with orchestras ranging from the New York Philharmonic and Montreal Symphony Orchestra to the London Symphony Orchestra and the Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale Rai. She has performed in venues from Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center to the Berlin Philharmonie, the Vienna Konzerthaus, Seoul Arts Center and Sydney Opera House. She has made fifteen albums, all of which have topped the Billboard classical charts. Her first fourteen albums were recorded with Grammy Award-winning producer Adam Abeshouse. During the pandemic she recorded three albums which form a trilogy: A Character of Quiet, An American Mosaic, and Undersong. An American Mosaic was nominated for a Grammy. Her most recent recording, Complicité (Supertrain Records, 2025), is her first all-Bach album in over ten years and features Jennifer Johnson Cano, mezzo-soprano and Peggy Pearson, oboe d’amore along with the string ensemble Simone founded and directs, Baroklyn. Recorded with producer Silas Brown, the album also includes composer Philip Lasser’s continuo realizations and recomposition of Bach’s Air on the G String.

In recent years, Dinnerstein has created projects that express her broad musical interests. She gave the world premiere of The Eye Is the First Circle at Montclair State University, the first multi-media production she conceived, created, and directed, which uses as source materials her father Simon Dinnerstein’s painting The Fulbright Triptych and Charles Ives’s Concord Sonata. She premiered Richard Danielpour’s An American Mosaic, a tribute to those affected by the pandemic, in a performance on multiple pianos throughout Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. Following her recording, Mozart in Havana, she brought the Havana Lyceum Orchestra from Cuba to the U.S. for the first time, performing eleven concerts. Philip Glass composed his Piano Concerto No. 3 for her, co-commissioned by twelve orchestras. Working with Renée Fleming and the Emerson String Quartet, she premiered André Previn and Tom Stoppard’s Penelope at the Tanglewood, Ravinia and Aspen music festivals, and performed it at Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, and presented by LA Opera and the Cleveland Orchestra.

The Washington Post comments, “it is Dinnerstein’s unreserved identification with every note she plays that makes her performance so spellbinding.” In a world where music is everywhere, she hopes that it can still be transformative.

Cellist ALEXIS PIA GERLACH has been lauded by the press for the “gripping emotion” and “powerful artistry” of her interpretations; qualities which have led to a career striking for its wide range of artistic collaborations. She has appeared extensively in recitals and as a soloist with orchestras across the United States, as well as in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and South America, with such conductors as Mstislav Rostropovich, James DePreist and Peter Oundjian.

Ms. Gerlach is a founding member of the acclaimed Trio Solisti, with whom she performs throughout the US on major concert series. The piano trio has recorded extensively, including a 2-CD set of the Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff Trios which was released on Bridge Records in 2016, and a critically acclaimed 2014 recording of trios by Ravel and Chausson, which was met by rave reviews from both The New York Times and Gramophone. This season the ensemble gives the world premiere of a new trio written by composer Jennifer Higdon, commissioned for them by Arizona Friends of Chamber Music and the Harvard Musical Association. As a founding member of Concertante, a string sextet based in New York City, she toured throughout North America, Asia and the Middle East.

Ms. Gerlach has performed at major festivals including Marlboro, Aspen, Bridgehampton, La Musica di Asolo, Caramoor, and as a guest artist with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. She has played extensively with Musicians from Marlboro, performing on both national and international tours. A frequent collaborator with dancers, Ms. Gerlach has performed as solo cellist with the Paul Taylor Dance Company on tour in India and at New York’s City Center, and in a duo with New York City Ballet principal dancer, Damian Woetzel.

She is active in commissioning and premiering new works from many preeminent composers, such as Kevin Puts, Lowell Liebermann, Shulamit Ran, Richard Danielpour, Tigran Mansurian and Paul Moravec, and has worked with many others including Philip Glass, Thomas Ades, Osvaldo Golijov and Bright Sheng. Ms. Gerlach was born in New York City, and studied with Aldo Parisot at The Juilliard School and The Yale School of Music.

BIOS

Conductor of the Worcester Chorus since 2009, CHRIS SHEPARD is also in his eleventh year as Artistic Director of the Connecticut Choral Artists (CONCORA), the state’s oldest professional choir, Chris Shepard also serves as Music Director of two other organizations: Con Brio Choral Society on the CT shoreline, and St John’s Episcopal Church in Stamford. In May 2024, Chris launched THE COMPLETE BACH, a 132-concert project to present live performances of all of J.S. Bach’s works for the first time since Bach’s death. This monumental undertaking, under the auspices of Music Worcester, was inspired by Chris’s BACH2010 project, in which his Sydneian Bach Choir and Orchestra performed all of Bach’s choral cantatas in Sydney, Australia. THE COMPLETE BACH brings together local ensembles as well as internationally recognized performers such as pianists Jeremy Denk and Simone Dinnerstein, as well as The Sebastiens, Boston’s Handel & Haydn Society and Emmanuel Music.

His musical interests hardly stop in the eighteenth century, however. Chris has conducted much of the most significant largescale choral-orchestral repertoire, including the Verdi Requiem and annual Messiah performances at Carnegie Hall. His choirs have collaborated with a number of orchestras, such as the Juilliard Orchestra with Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Orquestra Sinfónica Nacional de Mexico with Carlos Miguel Prieto, and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra with Simone Young—as well as performances with Broadway legend Patti Lupone and Ray Davies of the Kinks. A committed music educator, Chris has served on the faculty of the Taft School, Sydney Grammar School, Hotchkiss Summer Portals, and Holy Cross College, and has conducted numerous regional and All-State high school festial choirs in New England, New York and Australia. Chris holds degrees from the Hartt School, the Yale School of Music, and the University of Sydney, where his PhD dissertation won the American Choral Directors Association’s 2012 Julius Herford Prize for outstanding doctoral thesis in choral music.

PROGRAM NOTES

BWV 41: Jesu, nun sei gepreiset

Cantata BWV41 was written for New Year’s Day 1725. It is a chorale-cantata, based on the music and text of the 1593 Johannes Herman chorale Jesu, nun sei gepreiset. This chorale is of exceptional length; although it consists of only three strophes, or verses, each of those verses is fourteen lines long.

Converting such a long chorale verse into a chorale-prelude poses difficulties for a composer. Bach’s solution was to compose a very long introductory chorus, setting the music into a broadly AABCA structure. The orchestral ritornello is marked by the festive, syncopated trumpet call, featuring alternation between the trumpet, oboe and string families. The chorale melody is presented throughout as a soprano cantus firmus. The music changes to reflect the peace of the text “that we in goodly stillness,” shifting to a more stately triple meter, with the basses singing a long pedal point on the word “stillness.” For the promise to surrender ourselves to God for now and evermore, Bach constructs a Palestrina-style motet, still presenting the chorale tune in the soprano. There is a short recapitulation of the opening choral material to close the festive movement.

As if to give the listener a break from the complexities of the opening movement, the following soprano aria feels more like a pastoral shepherd’s song than a sacred aria, redolent of music from the Christmas Oratorio. The oboe trio accompanies the naïve soprano melody, asking that we might end the new year as well as we began it. This is a theme that returns throughout all of the New Year cantatas: thanksgiving for the old year, and asking blessing for the new.

The alto recitative and tenor aria continue this theme, both asking for God’s blessing in the year. The tenor aria is a particularly beautiful example of Bach’s “longing” affect—the believer longing for God’s blessing. For this aria, Bach originally used the violoncello piccolo, a slightly smaller cello with a fifth string that allowed the player to exploit a higher range than usual. As the strings were closer together, the player was also able to negotiate the large jumps with greater ease than on the modern cello.

The bass recitative, asking for God’s protection from Satan, includes a wonderful burst from choir, quoting Luther’s German litany of 1528-29. The cantata closes with the final verse of the chorale, repeating the trumpet fanfare from the opening movement. In a nod to the chorale melody’s Renaissance origins, Bach moves between duple and triple time, creating a dancelike feel.

BWV 29: Wir danken dir Gott, wir danken dir

Bach’s biographers are always quick to point out that he was a somewhat prickly employee, leaving some jobs because of disagreements or dissatisfaction, and spending the final years of his life locked in an insurmountable conflict with his headmaster at the Thomasschule in Leipzig. But this is not entirely fair to Bach. Part of his professional difficulties in the commercial city of Leipzig was that he ultimately answered to two masters who themselves didn’t agree about much: the church council and the town council.

As part of his duties to the town council, Bach provided music to celebrate the election. This cantata had its first performance on Monday, 27th August 1731. Signaling its importance to Bach, it was performed at least twice again, in 1739 and 1749, when it was very likely the last cantata that Bach performed in his lifetime. The text of the cantata combines thankfulness to God with an almost jingoistic sense of God as Leipzig’s protector. These were heady days for this famous German trade fair city, and it is not surprising that the city fathers saw themselves as having a “most favored nation” status. As the bass recitative questions, “Where is there a people such as we, to whom God is so near and merciful?”

Fewer than twenty extant cantatas begin with a sinfonia, a free-standing orchestral introduction—and few are as festal as the opening organ concerto of BWV29. This is a direct and complete parody of the first movement of the E Major Violin Partita, a brilliant work that Bach used again later in the Wedding Cantata. This is a particularly fine reworking of the idiomatically violinistic writing. It is thought that Bach himself would have played the solo organ part.

The thanksgiving chorus also reappeared later in Bach’s life, suggesting the esteem in which he held the movement, when he transformed it into the Gratias agimus tibi and Dona nobis pacem of the B Minor Mass. At first glance, it is typical of Bach’s stile antico writing, in which he imitates the Palestrina-like Renaissance motets. These tend to have instruments double the vocal parts colla parte and are devoid of the concerto-type ebullience associated with Baroque music. But after establishing the Renaissance flavor, Bach adds trumpets and timpani later in the piece, both doubling the singers and adding their own voices as they develop the musical material.

The tenor aria celebrates God’s strength and offers praise to God; Bach literally highlights the word “highest” by taking the tenor to the top of his range for this word. The comparison of Leipzig to Zion is evident in the second half of this aria; a litany of how God shows Leipzig his favor follows in the bass recitative. In the lovely, lilting siciliano that follows, the soprano shows more humility, asking for blessing and mercy and guidance for the town’s leaders. The alto recitative is essentially a prayer for the town council, answered by the citizens singing “Amen.” Interestingly, Bach recapitulates the tenor aria—a rare practice for him—by having the alto sing the first part of that aria verbatim, though in a higher key. In a fun tour de force for this performance, we use the same singer for these parallel arias—Alex O’Neil, who is equally at home as a tenor and a countertenor!

The brass provide a fanfare to the closing chorale, in another departure from Bach’s usual technique. This is a particularly bright hymn, pitched at the very top of all the singers’ and instrumentalists’ range, affirming the townsfolks’ belief in God and their city.

BWV 190: Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied

Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied is one of the most festive cantatas composed for Bach’s first cantata cycle in Leipzig. First performed on New Year’s Day 1724, Bach later reused the music to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Augsburg Confession. Unfortunately, the original orchestration of the first two movements was lost; in today’s concert, we perform the Diethard Hellmann reconstruction, published by Breitkopf und Härtel.

The first movement is one of the most immediately accessible and attractive movements in all of Bach’s works. The use of three trumpets, three oboes and strings gives a festive feel; the psalm texts and use of the German Te Deum give the opening movement a real dignity. The first movement is in the high Baroque ritornello style, with the chorus singing material derived from the orchestra introduction. The use of the Lutheran Te Deum as a unison cantus firmus would have been instantly recognizable by the congregation. Bach inserts a choral fugue on a very simple rising scalar subject to the text “let all who have breath praise him” before returning to the original musical material.

The German Te Deum reappears in the second movement, with the choir singing chorale-like phrases of the melody with solo recitatives interspersed, asking for blessing for the new year. The following alto aria, again set to very accessible and attractive music, bears all the hallmarks of a Baroque dance. The singers tells the congregation to praise God and follow him as the Good Shepherd; it is perhaps this pastoral reference that gives the piece a slightly rustic feel.

The bass recitative takes up the theme of Jesus as shepherd, leading into a tenor-bass duet that is as beautiful as the alto aria is joyful. In this litany, the singers begin each line with “Jesus,” as a combination prayer and statement of faith. The solo instrument designation has been lost; scholars agree that either an oboe d’amore or a violin could play this line.

The cantata closes with the same chorale we have heard earlier in this concert, this time in a setting of the second strophe of Jesu, nun sei gepreiset. Unlike BWV41, this version remains in common time for the entire verse, and the trumpet fanfares are different.