The American Bach Soloists Newsletter from Music Director Jeffrey Thomas

Dear Friends of ABS–

This year’s installment of Noteworthy is being composed in the beautiful desert hills south of Joshua Tree National Park and north of Palm Springs. I’m here on a reading and studying retreat, in preparation for my residency at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Study and Conference Center at Villa Serbelloni, located on Lake Como in Bellagio, Italy. I’ll be there for the month of April, working on my manuscript about Handel’s Messiah. That trip is only a small part of a very exciting and fulfilling year for me, and for ABS, which really began at our annual Board Retreat last August. There, on a beautiful Saturday morning, our Board of Directors and Staff set in place renewed commitment to the kind of high standards and goals that make me so proud to be music director of one of the world’s most recognized and highly esteemed Bach performance organizations.

So, in the next few paragraphs, I want to tell you about those renewed commitments, to give you progress reports, and to let you in on our most exciting plans for the future.

As you know, our 20th anniversary is just around the corner. Already in our Eighteenth Season, we have continued to prove our longevity and determination to remain competitive in a richly saturated Bay Area cultural environment. And on a much larger scale, we have retained the interest of the international early music community, despite the challenges of what was a dwindling recording market around the turn of the millennium. But at that meeting, as we looked ahead toward our twentieth year (2008-2009), we considered what we believe are, to our patrons, the most important areas of our work: repertory, artists, recordings, and historical integrity.

I can’t tell you how thrilling it was for me to sit with our Board—ten of the most dedicated curators of the legacy of Bach’s music—and observe the enthusiasm that each and every one of them has for our continued strivings for excellence. Together, we developed plans that will bring us to that important anniversary, stronger than ever, and all accompanied by the beautiful music of Bach, of his Baroque contemporaries, and of those who followed in their footsteps.

THE CURRENT SEASON

This season is one of our most ‘all-Bach’ years since our founding in 1989. Every concert from January through May features some of the greatest works by our namesake. If you attended our performances of New Year’s cantatas last month, you heard works that were completely new to our repertory. Each musician who participated in those concerts remarked how exciting it was for us to work on ‘new’ music...a rare event for those of us who specialize in Johann Sebastian Bach’s works. The music was thrilling. And as a byproduct of our renewed dedication to historically informed and accurate performance standards, we enjoyed the rare opportunity to hear soprano and alto solos sung by boys rather than mature females. It was an immensely informative experience. Together we learned new aspects of the attainment of balances between voices and instruments, and we discovered that Bach—who knew better than anyone how to utilize young voices in the best possible way—seems to have demanded less depth of rhetorical expression from his choir school students, while, at the same time, chose texts and musical settings that capitalized on their naturally naïve and ingenuous portrayals.

But as we have such a wealth of talent on our rosters, it seems perfectly appropriate that our next concerts will feature two of the brightest shining stars among their peers. For decades, the technical prowess of violinist Elizabeth Blumenstock has been legendary: Her bravura performances are acclaimed world-wide. And Mary Wilson, known to us for only three short years, has emerged as not only one of our most favorite sopranos, but as an artist who is unparalleled in her particularly scintillating and dynamic rapport with our audiences. We have built a set of concerts (March 2-5) around the supreme artistry of these two luminaries, and have chosen—as supporting musicians—a group of musical ‘friends’ that will include ABS Competition winner Debra Nagy (oboe) and Charles Sherman (harpsichord), making his ABS debut. I assure you that the experience will be spectacular.

Festivities to celebrate Bach’s birthday month will continue just three weeks later (March 23-26), when we will again pair our highest standards of performance authenticity with top-notch vocal soloists. For nearly twenty years, we have cherished every opportunity to perform works from Bach’s early years in the cities of Cöthen, Mühlhausen, and Weimar. In those periods, his compositional style was more dynamic and malleable than during his most mature years in Leipzig, yielding a kind of openness and directness of expression that was at its zenith before the rigidly defined requirements of his position as Thomaskantor were put in place in 1723. Each of those earlier works is like a beautifully set collection of precious gems. Every individual voice and instrument is ascribed its unique function in the overall delivery of the drama of the texts. And, as we know from experience, music that would later become part of some of Bach’s most significant masterworks can be found in these early cantatas in almost embryonic forms. These works reveal the passionate and at times ‘trendy’ young composer, whose determination and artistic ambition were irrepressible. The vocal soloists you will hear—including soprano Ellen Hargis, alto Judith Malafronte, and tenor Aaron Sheehan—are absolute masters of rhetoric and sensitivity, and we look forward especially to the debut of the young American baritone, Jesse Blumberg, whose singing has been described by The Washington Post as “no less than revelatory.”

Then, following the close of our Bach birthday month, and after I return from my residency at the Rockefeller/Bellagio Center, we will end the current season with another “Bach Bash” (May 11-14)…an almost embarrassingly rich program of Brandenburg Concertos in various forms; sinfonias; instrumental concertos; and the first Orchestral Suite. Many of the nation’s top-ranked specialists in Bach performance will be on deck, including ABS Competition winner Michael Sponseller (harpsichord), a veritable powerhouse of oboists—John Abberger, Stephen Hammer, and Debra Nagy—and Cynthia Roberts (violin and violino piccolo) whose stellar international career includes concertmaster positions with New York Collegium, Concert Royal, Dallas Bach Society, and Apollo’s Fire.

RECORDINGS

Some of the most exciting plans made at our last retreat were regarding our ongoing series of recordings. Every lover of classical music has seen the unfortunate dissolution of fine recording labels and retail outlets. And in a world where the audio quality of recordings seems to be on the downslide—whoever imagined that the advent of high-resolution digital sound would have been trumped by the low standards of mp3 audio?—many of us have been waiting patiently for the next audio breakthroughs that might reinvigorate the classical recording market. Although new standards for super-high-definition sound have yet to take hold, there have been very encouraging developments that are most fortunate for classical music, and ABS is staying at the forefront.

Most people agree that, within anywhere from a few years to a decade, ‘hard copies’ (i.e. CDs) of digital music will become superfluous. Wider and greater internet bandwidth continues to remove barriers for the transmission and distribution of even the most spectacularly high-resolution sound files. So, the most recent innovations are in the delivery systems of recorded music. We now browse the internet rather than the bins of a CD store for titles. And the companies that are truly at the helm are those that provide full-resolution “lossless” download formats, rather than limiting their customers’ enjoyment to the truncated, and even distorted, sounds of compressed (mp3, wma, aac) audio.

ABS has a rich legacy of more than a dozen highly acclaimed recordings, many of which have been out of print for several years. Unwilling to let those recordings disappear forever, our Board worked hard to reclaim the licenses from our previous recording companies, and authorized a plan to move forward in a partnership with Magnatune.com, an ingenious web site that allows users to download titles from their excellent catalogue in several formats. You can choose to download mp3 files for your portable audio players, or “wave” files that can be burned to a CDR to create an exact copy of the disc as it would be found in a retail store. Additionally, users can choose to have a hard copy CD sent to any address. One of the most intriguing aspects of Magnatune.com is that users choose the price they wish to pay for their purchases. And since Magnatune.com pays the artists a full 50% of gross revenue (rather than an amount that usually comes to about 10% from recording companies), most purchasers are generous.

So far, we already have three re-released titles available through Magnatune: Favorite Cantatas (including “Ein feste Burg” and “Wachet auf!”); Haydn Masses, and our historic 2 CD set of Bach’s Mass in B Minor. Very shortly after the publication of this edition of Noteworthy, our recording of Italian Transcriptions (including the Concerto for Four Harpsichords, and Bach’s setting of the Pergolesi Stabat Mater) will be available, followed in quick succession by all five of our remaining Cantatas volumes. What wonderful news! Our recordings can now remain available forever, and can benefit from the easy and nearly effortless technology of electronic distribution.

But our plans for recordings don’t end here! We are in the midst of producing a series of new releases, including the Bach Violin Concertos with Elizabeth Blumenstock, the Brandenburg Concertos, The Art of Countertenor Ian Howell (2006 ABS Competition Winner), and—my dream—a re-recording of the Mass in B Minor, as part of our 20th Anniversary Season celebrations. You will hear more about these truly thrilling projects in the near future. But for now, I hope that you’ll log on to the Magnatune site, and return often. To let your friends know of our re-releases and availability, simply direct them to: http://magnatune.com/artists/abs

FUTURE SEASONS

Finally, as part of our planning for the next several seasons, and in keeping with our mission and principles of repertory and historically informed performance practice, we have begun to “compose” our programs for the next two years. Currently on the table for next year, in addition to our annual performances of Messiah, is Bach’s Christmas Oratorio. Did you know that the Weinachts-Oratorium is really a compilation of six individual cantatas, and that three of those cantatas are for New Year’s Day, the Sunday after New Year’s, and Epiphany (January 6th)? This makes the entire set of cantatas a perfect choice for our January 2008 concerts. If you enjoyed the thrilling sounds of trumpets and kettle drums last month, you’ll be in heaven next year: These six cantatas are even more sensational! Bach truly splurged by adding horns, flutes, and four oboes to the battery of brass. But what thrills me the most about these concerts is that we will be performing them one-per-part, and with two sets of vocal soloists, many of whom will be drawn from our recent vocal competition. I’ve been back and forth across the country several times this year to work with phenomenally talented young singers on the brink of great careers. And I promise you that you will be as excited as I am to hear these gifted young artists who are as passionate about Bach as we have ever been.

We’ll continue in 07-08 with a program called “Vocal Visionaries” that will feature the American Bach Choir, our superb choral ensemble, in a program of music by composers who “pushed the envelope” of expression and choral techniques. You’ll hear music by old-world masters Victoria, Gesualdo, and Lotti, and works by new-world masters Richard Strauss and Eric Whitacre, along with an encore performance of Sandström’s Agnus Dei. Next, in April 2008, we will have the great pleasure of presenting Ian Howell, countertenor, winner of the 2006 ABS / Henry I. Goldberg Young Artists Competition in a program of works by Bach, Domenico Scarlatti, and Handel. Bach’s luscious cantata, Vergnügte Ruh, will be the centerpiece, along with Scarlatti’s equally rich setting of Salve Regina. A selection of arias from Handel’s operas and oratorios will complete the program. And in May of 2008, to celebrate the anniversaries of Johann Friedrich Fasch and Giuseppe Torelli, trumpet virtuoso John Thiessen will be the featured soloist in a program of trumpet concertos and Telemann’s delightful Water Music.

Then, our own 20th Anniversary Season will be upon us. We are planning a revival of our exacting interpretation of Bach’s great Mass in B Minor, a program of Bach’s best cantatas (chosen with your assistance!), motets by Bach and his contemporaries, and a very special event in honor of George Frideric Handel’s 250th anniversary.

Many of you have been with us for a long time and together we’ve held firm to our love of Bach and ABS during some economically challenging years. I continue to feel richly blessed by the opportunities afforded to me by ABS to champion such great music and such great performers. Thank you for taking the time to read this edition of Noteworthy…I look forward to seeing you at our next concerts.

Jeffrey Thomas, Music Director