Chicago Classical Review

One will see Bach’s birthday listed as either March 21or March 31, 1685. The confusion arises from the gradual shift across Europe from the Julian calendar, which shortchanged the year by about 10 days, to the Georgian one over the period of Bach’s life. 

The 340^th arrival of Bach’s birthday (Julian version) was celebrated Friday at St. Vincent de Paul Parish in Lincoln Park with the inaugural concert of Bach in the City.

Bach in the City is the reincarnation of the Bach Week Festival, which ran in Evanston for 50 years under the direction of Richard Webster. After Bach Week ended its remarkable run last May, musicians and loyal patrons approached Webster about how to keep the music going. Webster offered that new leadership, administration, audience members and a venue were all required, and this call was answered by a group of dedicated supporters whose efforts were on full display Friday.

 “Bach and the Venetians” offered a promising and well-attended pilot performance for the city’s newest music organization. The program paired two of Bach’s six motets with the brass and choral works of Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli, nephews who were successive maestri of San Marco Cathedral in Venice during the height of the Renaissance. 

The volunteer chorus was an even mix of former Bach Week choristers and new members. The city’s own Gaudete Brass served as the brass consort, their core quintet filled out to an octet with area stalwarts that included Newberry Consort artistic director Liza Malamut. Cellist Nomin Zolzaya of the Illinois Symphony, bassist Ian Hallas of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and organist Jacob Reed, an organ scholar at Rockefeller Chapel, constituted the excellent continuo ensemble. Webster presided over it all with a welcoming, supporting poise that evinced his decades of experience.

Bach’s motet Jesu, meine Freude, BWV 227, was the most substantial work on the program. Its eleven brief movements are arranged in a stunning symmetrical architecture that frames its central episodes. The bookending chorales had the spiritual balm one expects in this music, though a few of work’s knottier contrapuntal passages were rather beyond the amateur chorus, which was not always aided by the venue’s cavernous acoustic.

O Jesu Christ, meins Lebens Licht, BWV 118, is a single-movement motet, heard in its original version with brass accompaniment. The chorus again conveyed the consoling air of this music, first printed to accompany a funeral procession, though the punishingly high trumpet parts—originally written for a now-defunct medieval trumpet, which appears nowhere else in Bach’s writing—sounded fitfully insecure.

The brass ensemble was largely in fine form though in the various Gabrieli selections, which were ideally suited to the spacious layout of St. Vincent De Paul. Each half opened with their burnished and nimble playing, in Giovanni’s second Canzon septime toni and Sonata Pian’e Forte, respectively. The junior Gabrieli’s choral In ecclesiis offered a series of vocal soloists moments in the spotlight, and all acquitted themselves admirably.

Friday was also a welcome and rare opportunity to hear the Venetians’ works for brass and antiphonal chorus. Plaudite, Psalite was delivered with enthusiastic vigor, and Andrea’s Missa Brevis, for which the brass were both onstage and in the rear balcony, closed the night enfolding the audience with gleaming sonorities.

Organist Reed gave an incisive account of Bach’s dramatic Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor, BWV 542, one of the composer’s most harmonically audacious works. 

The odd work out on the program was a contemporary motet, Locus iste, by Welshman Paul Mealor (b. 1975) for which the chorus moved out to encircle the sanctuary’s central crucifix.

Mealor’s warm, close harmonies, familiar now from multiple major British royal ceremonies, shone luminously from the choir, and soprano Ana Miranda-Gonzalez helped bring the work to a close with her delicate solo work toward the end. Miranda-Gonzalez also serves as Bach in the City’s operations manager, a double-duty that speaks to the effort and dedication it takes to get a new arts organization up and running.

bachinthecity.org

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