2015 - Brecon Baroque 10th Anniversary Festival
The 2015 Festival will mark our 10th anniversary and will centre around JS Bach’s life and work in Leipzig.
A performance of the St John Passion with soloists and the Brecon Cathedral Choir, supported by the instrumentalists of Brecon Baroque, will start the festival on Friday 23rd October in Brecon Cathedral.
Some of Bach’s famous and loved organ works will follow on Saturday, as well as a performance of The Art of Fugue by Rachel Podger and Brecon Baroque. This will be preceded by a talk on Art of Fugue by John Butt, Gardiner Chair of Music at Glasgow University, who will also join Alison McGillivray in a joint cello and harpsichord recital on the Sunday night. A Brecon version of a Leipzig coffee house, ‘Cafe Zimmermann’, will present short pop up concerts during the weekend with students from the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama performing some of the music likely to have been heard there at the time.
The Brecon Baroque Festival Orchestra and Powys Youth Orchestra will be back for the final evening in a programme which will include Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto no 2 for trumpet, oboe, recorder, violin and strings, as well as a concerto for violin and trumpet by Telemann. Either a Baroque Tea Dance or Ball and a number of other events are planned, and further details will be available in due course.
2014
The 2014 Festival was very much enjoyed by both audiences and performers, as a celebration of the Circle of Bach – music from JS Bach’s forebears, contemporaries and friends (including Telemann, godfather to his son CPE Bach), JS Bach himself, and CPE Bach, along with colleagues of CPE from the court of Frederick the Great at the Palace of Sans Souci in Potsdam.
Festival reviews
- The Guardian ****
Brecon Baroque festival review – grave but graceful Bach
- Wales Arts Review (Steph Power)
‘A Musical Offering’ with Rachel Podger and Brecon Baroque
‘In the Name of Bach’ with Bojan Cicic and Mahan Esfahani
