Bach Festival

Ticket information will be available in the spring.

Gamble Auditorium

You can request to be added to the Bach Festival mailing list by contacting the Conservatory events office at (440) 826-8070, emailing bachfest@bw.edu or filling out our online form.

The Baldwin Wallace Bach Festival - the oldest collegiate Bach festival in the nation - was founded in 1932 by Professor Albert Riemenschneider (longtime director of the BW Conservatory) and his wife, Selma. The Baldwin Wallace Festival Choir and Orchestra presented the first Bach Festival in June 1933, and we've been performing annual Bach festivals ever since. In the current era, the festival is evolving to include year-round events, like Bach Haus, that explore Bach's influence on a broad spectrum of music.

Baldwin Wallace performing groups are joined by faculty members and professional musicians in the three-day, multi-event program. Soloists are internationally known artists; the lecturers, distinguished Bach and Baroque scholars. Our students consider the unusual opportunity of participating, as colleagues, with world-class professionals a high point in their performing experience.

Beginning with the 43rd festival in 1975, the festival performing groups have been reduced to sizes now known to be more in line with those employed in Bach's time. Likewise, from 1975 on, all vocal works have been sung in the language of their origins. These changes have made possible the cultivation of a truly Baroque sound with inherent clarity, drive and intensity.

With a repertoire list that includes more than 300 compositions by J.S. Bach, as well as selected works from 52 other composers, the Festival rotates Bach's four major choral works on a four-year cycle. In this way, BW students are exposed to all four of the major Bach choral works during their college years; the B-minor Mass, the St. Matthew and St. John Passions, and the Christmas Oratorio.

By Dr. Melvin Unger

Many would say it is the lucidity of Bach's music - the consummate integration of its structural elements - that makes it so great. Bach was unsurpassed in his ability to grasp (intuitively it seems) the possibilities of a melodic or harmonic idea, and to work these out in coherent, yet expressive ways. His music functions equally well on both horizontal and vertical planes - as a series of simultaneous melodic strands and as a progression of chords. It brings competing impulses into equilibrium: the logical and the mystical, the sonic and the symbolic. It constantly surprises the listener with its inventiveness.

While using as its starting point the harmonic language, compositional techniques and rhetorical figures of its day, it moves far beyond them. Bach's style is characterized by a richness of chromatic language, a logic of thematic unfolding and an overlay of hermeneutical (interpretive) allusions. It is no wonder that succeeding composers held him in such awe. Robert Schumann put it well: "Wir sind alle Stumper gegen ihn" (Next to him we are all plodders).

Read recent reviews of the Baldwin Wallace Bach Festival: 

• Bach Notes - Newsletter of the American Bach Society
• Various clevelandclassical.com reviews
• BW Bach Festival highlighting saxophone, returning to roots on 86th annual event (preview) - Cleveland.com
• MUSIC REVIEW: Baldwin Wallace Bach Fest - Cool Cleveland
• MUSIC REVIEW: Kenari Quartet at Baldwin Wallace - Cool Cleveland
• MUSIC REVIEW: Bach Festival @BaldwinWallace - Cool Cleveland
  Bach Festival at Baldwin Wallace concludes with hair-raising 'St. Matthew Passion' - The Plain Dealer
• Baldwin Wallace Bach Festival Concert One (April 15) - clevelandclassical.com

Presenting a comprehensive picture of Bach's creative genius is one of the chief objectives of the Baldwin Wallace Bach Festival. View a list of works performed on Festival programs since its inception in 1933.