PBO Cancels Remainder of Season

This past week saw “the difficult but inevitable news that Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra [PBO] & Chorale has cancelled all live performances as originally scheduled through April 2021.” This will include all remaining concerts in the subscription season, the Masses for Troubled Times concert, whose orchestra would consist of members of Juilliard415 joining the PBO musicians, and the February Gala celebrating the debut of the new Music Director Richard Egarr. For the remainder of the season, PBO will focus on cyberspace-based presentations under the rubric of the 2020/Virtual series.

Programming for this series involves several alternative themes, each taking a different approach to content and repertoire as follows:

• Live from Amsterdam: Egarr is currently based in Amsterdam. Every month he will prepare a livestream event, which he will deliver from his post at a keyboard. Programming will also include invited guests and the occasional surprises.
• Musical Explorations: This will be an online education series curated by Scholar-in-Residence Bruce Lamott that will be organized around insights, interviews, and lecture-demonstrations involving PBO musicians and special guests.
• PBO SESSIONS@Home: This alternative concert series will continue with live-streams from both Amsterdam and the Bay Area.
• JAMOnline: This will be a monthly series of events co-hosted by Egarr and Jews & Music (JAM) Scholar-in-Residence Francesco Spagnolo, which will feature insightful dialog and music from PBO musicians and special guests.
• New Music for Old Instruments: This will be a series of conversations between Egarr and PBO Artistic Partner Tarik O’Regan discussing the efforts of living composers writing for period instruments.

2020/Virtual is a subscription series. All those that subscribed to the 2020–21 concert season will receive membership free of charge. This can be enabled through a coupon code send by electronic mail. Those unable to find their coupon should be able to subscribe through a hyperlink on the general subscription page. For all others, the price will be $50 for all events being offered through the end of this coming April. All that is necessary is to fill out the form on the membership registration Web page.