by Daniel Hathaway
When you’re in your mid-eighties, it’s good to stimulate your grey matter by taking up something new. This year, the 85th Baldwin Wallace Bach Festival will make a little detour from its normal four-year cycle of performing Johann Sebastian Bach’s B-minor Mass, the two Passions, and the Christmas Oratorio.
On the weekend of April 7-8, the Festival will focus on the theme of how Bach’s music inspired Johannes Brahms, and the featured choral work will be the German Requiem. Pianists Pierre and Sophié van der Westhuizen, who perform as the Westhuizen Duo, will also play a central role in this year’s Festival.
In a conference call with Festival director Dirk Garner and Pierre van der Westhuizen, Garner was quick to assure Bach Festival regulars that this year’s departure from the norm is a special case. [Read more…]
1935, 1936, 1940, 1946, 1947, 1951, 1955, 1959, 1963, 1967, 1971, 1975, 1979, 1983, 1985, 1989, 1993, 1997, 2001, 2005, 2007, 2011 — and now 2015. Those are the 23 years in which the 83-year-old Baldwin Wallace Bach Festival has featured Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Great Catholic Mass,” as his sons described it. That makes it a tradition, for sure, but Dirk Garner’s concept in his first year as the festival’s new artistic director was notable for its infusion of new energy and vitality into a work that needs a regular shaking-out in order to remain fresh. 
The eighty-second edition of the Baldwin Wallace Bach Festival, “the first collegiate Bach Festival in the Nation,” comprised four afternoon and evening concerts in Gamble Auditorium on Friday and Saturday, April 25 and 26. Set up so that BW’s students will get a crack at performing each of four extended Bach works during their college career, the festival rotates the Leipzig cantor’s two passions, the Christmas Oratorio and the B-Minor mass during each four-year cycle.