Bach Festival Will Conclude With Concertos, Cantatas

The Northwest Bach Festival began last week with an organ recital and chamber music and ends this weekend with concertos and cantatas. Gunther Schuller, the festival’s artistic director, will conduct the vocal and instrumental program tonight and the all-orchestral performance Sunday afternoon.

Just before the Bach festival began last week, the Grammy Award nominations were announced. Schuller was a nominee in two Grammy categories: one for a recording of his Pulitzer Prize-winning classical composition “Of Reminiscences and Reflections” and the other for his work as composer, arranger and conductor on saxophonist Joe Lovano’s jazz album “Rush Hour.”

Tonight’s program begins and ends with Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos Nos. 1 and 2 and includes Cantata No. 64 and an elaborated chorale movement from Cantata No. 23. All the works include brass instruments, not only trumpet and horn, Schuller says, but trombones as well.

“Most people don’t know that Bach used the trombones fairly frequently in his church cantatas,” says Schuller.

For the two Brandenburg concertos, the soloists include trumpet virtuoso David Hickman and hornist Richard Todd along with flutist Michael Faust, oboist Allan Vogel and Spokane Symphony concertmaster Kelly Farris.

Hickman appeared in Spokane in 1988 as soloist with the Spokane Symphony. He studied with Armando Ghitalla and Maurice Andre and now teaches at Arizona State University.

Todd is principal horn and horn soloist of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. He teaches at both the University of Southern California and the University of California at Los Angeles. Todd performed with the Spokane Symphony at the 1993 Festival at Sandpoint.

Faust, winner of several important European competitions and a recipient of the 1986 Pro Musicis Award, is principal flute with the Cologne Radio Orchestra. Along with Bach Festival harpsichordist Ilton Wjuniski, Faust has recorded on the GM label a three-CD survey of 18th-century flute and harpsichord music.

Vogel studied oboe with Robert Bloom and harpsichord with Ralph Kirkpatrick at Yale University. He teaches at the California Institute of the Arts and at UCLA, and he has appeared several times at the Northwest Bach Festival, both as soloist and with the chamber ensemble The Musical Offering.

Farris recently celebrated his 25th season as concertmaster of the Spokane Symphony. A native of Walla Walla, Farris studied at the University of Washington with Emmanuel Zetlin and at Juilliard with Ivan Galamian, Dorothy Delay, Robert Mann and Felix Galimar. He teaches at Eastern Washington University, where he is director of the University Symphony Orchestra.

The cantatas in tonight’s concert feature soprano soloist Darnell Preston, mezzo-soprano JoAnne Bouma and bass-baritone John Frankhauser. All three singers are well-known in Spokane for their performances with the Bach festival and with the Spokane Symphony, Uptown Opera and other music series.

Tamara Schupman, director of the Bach Chorus for tonight’s concert, is also music director of the Spokane Area Children’s Chorus and has sung soprano roles in opera productions of the Spokane Symphony and Uptown Opera.

For Sunday afternoon’s Festival Finale, “Bach and his Contemporaries,” Schuller has scheduled Handel’s Oboe Concerto in G minor with Vogel as soloist and Farris performing a rarely played violin concerto movement by Francesco Bonporti, an Italian composer deeply admired by Bach.

The concert opens with a suite assembled by Schuller made up of movements drawn from six different suites by Georg Philipp Telemann. It closes with Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 4.

Both Bach festival concerts will be preceded by preconcert lectures by Verne Windham, music director of public radio station KPBX and former principal horn of the Spokane Symphony.

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