Final Could, as the ultimate serene measures of the “Dona nobis pacem” sounded in St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Evanston, the music additionally served to sundown Bach Week, the annual pageant celebrating J.S. Bach. After a 50-year run, the fest could be no extra, felled by dwindling grants and volunteers.
The organist and conductor Richard Webster, the music director of 98% of earlier Bach Weeks, selected to finish ceremoniously with Bach’s masterpiece of masterpieces, the B Minor Mass.
However on the afterparty contained in the close by Firehouse Grill, Webster discovered that not everybody was able to let Bach Week go. “I used to be mainly cornered at that social gathering,” he says. “A bunch of refrain members, some gamers, and a few new individuals who I didn’t know mentioned, ‘Look, we have now to maintain going.’ ”
Phoenix-like, a brand new enterprise known as Bach within the Metropolis now rises from the ashes of Bach Week. The primary Bach within the Metropolis live performance, “Bach and the Venetians,” occurs March 21 at St. Vincent de Paul in Lincoln Park, as soon as once more underneath Webster’s management. The organizers hope that occasion — and an earlier efficiency that day at Union Station for commuters — will spur a collection of Bach within the Metropolis occasions that finally will dot Chicago’s music scene.
Webster initially was skeptical about reneging on the finale. Bach Week was shutting down due to an issue acquainted to long-running arts teams in all places: In an period the place philanthropists are likely to pursue novelty, grant cash had tapered and the volunteers chasing these grants have been able to retire. Board members and folks charged with administrating the pageant have been exhausted. The group wanted contemporary blood and new main contributors for it to have any probability to reinvent.
One of many viewers members who accosted Webster was D.J. Gorman, a Wilmette lawyer and music lover who had by no means served on the board of a musical group earlier than. When Gorman implored Webster to not let this factor die, Webster remembers pondering, “OK, nicely, who the hell are you? Discuss is affordable, buddy.”
Gorman says it was the specter of Bach Week’s demise that motivated him — not that he wouldn’t have been prepared to assist out earlier than that, however there’s nothing like imminent demise to spur a way of urgency.
“I’m as responsible of this as anybody,” Gorman says. “You sit again and also you anticipate issues to occur. You anticipate Bach Week to occur each spring. It simply all the time has. Why wouldn’t it? And when it doesn’t, you scratch your head and say, ‘Effectively, nobody’s ever requested me for a contribution.’ And naturally they’ve. You simply haven’t paid consideration.”
Whereas the main focus – the eponymous Johann Sebastian – stays the identical, there may be a lot new to have fun within the metamorphosed Bach within the Metropolis. Seven of the 13 Bach within the Metropolis board members are new. Main the cost is a brand new administrator, Ana Miranda-Gonzalez, an area soprano and the communications director at St. Vincent de Paul. And that parish church serves because the group’s new house, after its director of music, Robert Beatty, accepted Webster’s request to host with an enthusiastic reply that you simply shouldn’t say in church.
However Bach within the Metropolis is not only a reboot. “We are able to’t simply type of add water, and say Bach Week! — uh, we’re simply kidding! We’re again!” Webster says. As a substitute of getting the pageant format concentrated within the spring (though Bach Week had really run for greater than per week for many years already), Bach within the Metropolis hopes, if the proof of idea works within the opening live performance, to house out many choices all year long.
The live performance on March 21 — Bach’s 340th birthday — will characteristic two motets for choir and a solo organ piece by Bach. The Venetians within the live performance title are Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli, whose music may have forces unfold across the church, taking part in in antiphonal dialog, together with an enormous orchestra and a fair greater refrain — Webster says it’s nearly twice as massive because the Bach Week refrain. “The refrain have been our fiercest advocates for going ahead with Bach within the Metropolis,” he says, “and so they recruited a few of their associates.”
The route of Bach within the Metropolis is determined by the response to this pilot live performance. Bach Week beforehand offered chamber concert events and recitals in addition to massive choral-orchestral extravaganzas — the entire Goldberg Variations, for instance, or cantatas, or a candlelight live performance surrounding the solo cello suites (the place candies got here with a ticket buy!). Perhaps there’s a spot for chamber music in Bach within the Metropolis’s future. Perhaps interval devices. Perhaps. “The concept is to maintain it going and develop it,” Gorman says. “I feel that’s the concept that many of the board members have as nicely.”
If Bach within the Metropolis does take off, Webster mentions the concept of getting a succession plan in place. He’s nonetheless bought loads of pep, having solely lately retired from his place at Trinity Church in Boston and gearing as much as run his forty eighth marathon in Could.
“I’m 72 and I’m on hearth for this as a lot as I used to be after I was 21,” Webster says. He could also be primarily based in Boston, and his 50-year pageant could also be performed for, however Chicago gained’t eliminate Richard Webster that simply.
“I would like this musical outlet,” he says. “I don’t wish to shrivel up. I really like what I do, and I nonetheless have a ardour and power for it.”
Graham Meyer is a Chicago arts author.
