Emmanuel Music is proud to announce its 2023–24 performance season, celebrating the works of Johann Sebatian Bach, and their lasting significance and influence. Across four major concerts, in addition to the continuing Cantata Series, winter Bach Institute intensive, Lenten Lindsey Chapel Series, and community outreach programs, Emmanuel Music boldly continues its mission of serving as a living laboratory for Bach, both in the Boston area and beyond. The pieces selected for this season by Artistic Director Ryan Turner, and the new motets commissioned by Emmanuel Music, highlight Bach’s impact on artists today.
The season opens with a rare opportunity to experience Bach across space and time, as renowned pianist Simone Dinnerstein performs three keyboard concerti by Bach, Mozart, and Glass. In December, Emmanuel Music celebrates the holiday season with a performance of Britten's dramatic cantata on the legendary life of Saint Nicolas. In March, the ensemble performs one of the greatest masterpieces of Baroque music, the St. Matthew Passion by J.S. Bach. And in June, Emmanuel Music sends off its ensemble to join BachFest Leipzig with a local program of four Bach cantatas, accompanied by newly commissioned motets.
Saturday, October 1
at 7:30pm
Emmanuel Church
Emmanuel Music opens its 53rd season with a program devoted to the theme of unity and neighborly love.
In Reena Esmail’s “This Love Between Us”, Eastern and Western musical traditions collide — a traditional Bach orchestration enhanced with sitar and tabla — in an exploration of the seven Indian religious traditions, looking for common ground in a spiritual journey towards unity, harmony, and kindness.
Sunday, December 18
at 3:00pm
Emmanuel Church
J. S. Bach’s radiant Christmas Oratorio has become a holiday favorite at Emmanuel Music. The six cantatas that comprise this work fully set the festival mood for the Christmas season. Bach engages us with exquisite pastoral soundscapes, profound arias and chorales, and dazzling choruses with trumpets and drums.Come experience this masterpiece in one exhilarating evening as we create our own holiday tradition.
April 29, 2023
Emmanuel Church
In the spring, Emmanuel Music continues an exploration on the wilder boundaries of the theme of love. Through three cantata-inspired works of Britten – Phaedra, Serenade, and Les Illuminations – the orchestra and soloists of Emmanuel Music will guide you from the heights of Greek melodrama to the libertine Bacchanalias of Arthur Rimbaud, in an expression of the everlasting theme of intemperate and unrestrained love.
The students of the Bach Institute January Intensive present a complete Bach cantata and selected obligato arias as the culmination of their immersive study.
