The Bach Collegium, the region's only early music choral and instrumental ensemble is excited to offer its First Annual Baroque Festival taking place the weekend of February 20th. This is an outgrowth of early instruments seminars from previous years, and it stems directly from the most positive audience response to recent concerts in which the musicians played their period instruments and talked a bit about them. This effectively provided more accessible audience interaction in an informal setting, and provides the framework for the weekend's festival.
Bach and Handel will be on tap Saturday evening February 20th at 8 at Zion Lutheran Church, in a free concert with suggested donation of $10. A spectacular collegium of early music instrumentalists will perform J.S.Bach's Suite No. 1 in C Major; Michael Hollman will perform an organ work of J.S. Bach; and the Bach Collegium choral group will perform a choral excerpt from Handel's Brockes Passion Pastiche along with the instrumentalists. You'll get a chance to see and hear baroque oboes, the baroque bassoon, baroque vi9olins and cellos, the violone, and of course the harpsichord.
Then the Collegium invites you to return Sunday at 4 to Zion Lutheran Church for an early instruments and choir concert of Handel's Brockes Passion Pastiche, which is a composition made up of several works by a variety of complementary composers. You'll recognize selections from Handel's Messiah, as well as a few strains from J.S Bach's John and Matthew Passions, and J. Ludwig Bach's Luke Passion. Regional soloists drawn from the University of Indianapolis and from IFW and Concordia Theological Seminary make the work come alive, and the buoyant style of the Baroque era is well served with the instrumentalists and choral performers of the Collegium. All performers are under the baton of Dr. Daniel Reuning, Artistic Director of the ensemble.
The location for both events is Zion Lutheran Church, Hanna Street at Creighton in Fort Wayne; and Friday evening's concert is free, while Sunday afternoon's concern has tickets ranging from $25 for Friends of Bach to $15 for general admission to $5 for students with an ID. For more information and to purchase tickets online, please go online to www.bachcollegium.org.
G. F. Handel. Brockes Passion
Dr. Reuning received the Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the University of Illinois - Champaign-Urbana. He has conducted many works by Johann Sebastian Bach: more than 30 Church Cantatas, both the John and the Matthew Passions, his own reconstruction of the Mark Passion, the anonymous Luke Passion (formerly attributed to J. S. Bach), the Magnificat in D, the Christmas Oratorio, and the Mass in B Minor. He is a member of The Global Bach Community, The American Bach Society, The American Choral Directors' Association, and The American Guild of Organists. He is also the Kantor of Redeemer Lutheran Church in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
