Late yesterday afternoon the San Francisco Bach Festival, performed primarily by students of the 2025 American Bach Academy, with some assistance from their mentors, who are members of American Bach Soloists (ABS), concluded this year’s San Francisco Bach Festival with two members of the Bach family along with Georg Philipp Telemann and George Frideric Handel. As might be expected, Johann Sebastian Bach dominated the program with three cantatas. In order of appearance, these were BWV 132 (Bereitet die Wege, bereitet die Bahn!) prior to the intermission, followed afterwards by BWV 10 (known as the “German Magnificat”) and one of the best-known cantatas, BWV 147 (Herz und Mund un Tat und Leben). All other selections on the program were instrumental.
Portrait of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach by Franz Conrad Löhr (from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)
Sadly, circumstances were such that I could attend only the first half of this program. BWV 132 was preceded by George Frideric Handel’s HWV 329, the penultimate work in his Opus 6 concerto grosso collection, composed in the key of A major. The cantata was then followed by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s H. 661 (Wq 182:5), the fifth of six symphonies he composed for Baron van Swieten in 1773, known as the Hamburger Sinfonien.
Each of the works was given a convincing account. The cantata soloists were soprano Rachel Doehring Jackson, mezzo Meghan Ryan, tenor Cameron Falby, and baritone Sepp Hammer. In the absence of the American Bach Choir, the concluding Chorale movement was sung as a quartet. While this half of the program may have been convincing, the expressiveness of the performances was never particularly compelling. One might almost say that this was a “business as usual” account of the two Bachs and Handel, as if the freshness of past Festival interpretations was fading before the listeners’ ears.
Is the spirit of the late eighteenth-century beginning to elude the Festival?
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