We recently spoke to Bruce Sorrell, Kansas City Chamber Orchestra founder and director. He discussed the festival and next week’s concert, and the festival’s upcoming Valentine's Day concert.
About Tuesday, January 24:
"The Bach Festival is the brainchild of Cynthia Siebert of Friends of Chamber Music. When she approached me last winter about the possibility, I leapt at the chance because we have played a lot of Bach over the years, and Bach is possibly the greatest composer in the Western canon. The Kansas City Chamber Orchestra has played the Brandenburg concertos many times over the past 25 seasons, and this is probably the third or fourth time we have made a concert of the entire set. They are a rich and wonderful treasure, and instrumentalists love the opportunity to play them. They give us the opportunity to feature lots of outrageously talented local players as soloists! Of course, being this familiar with these works, I have, as a conductor, conceptualized the qualities I like to bring to a performance on modern instruments (not original 'baroque' instruments or their copies). I ask for less vibrato, a very dancelike approach, and often faster tempos in the slow movements."
Concerning the upcoming Valentine’s Day concert:
"The other concert in the Bach Festival which we will perform represents music of Bach which we have never performed before: the famous 'Wedding' Cantata for soprano, strings and oboe, and two concertos for keyboard, originally written for the harpsichord, but in these performances played on the piano by an absolute master, Konstantin Lifschitz. It is an honor to get to perform these great works with him. And, of course, once the 'Wedding' Cantata was suggested for Valentine's, it was hard to even imagine anything else on the program!"
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Tuesday’s concert begins at 8 p.m. Tickets cost $17-$37. For more information, see ChamberMusic.org.
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