Celebrating Twenty-Six Years

III
Bach's St. John Passion

The Mardi Considine Spring Concert


An intimate production of this masterpiece
using a choir of eight singers, as Bach did, with
 a small orchestra of 18th-century instruments 
like those he wrote for. The ensemble will be led 
by Scott Metcalfe, a gifted early music director. 
Featuring tenor Jason McStoots as Evangelist
and baritone William Sharp as Jesus
Laurie Heimes & Margot Rood, sopranos
Kristen Dubenion Smith & Kim Leeds, altos
Aaron Sheehan, tenor
Brian Ming Chu, baritone

Friday, March 13, 2020 at 7:30 pm

All Saints' Church, 

16 All Saints' Road, Princeton

Note: Open to those who have already tickets for one of the performances


CANCELLED

Saturday, March 14, 2020 at 7:30 pm

All Saints' Church, 

16 All Saints' Road, Princeton


CANCELLED

Sunday, March 15, 2020 at 3:00 pm
Trinity Episcopal Church, Solebury, PA
A Note on Our Production of the St. John Passion
Johann Sebastian Bach’s St John Passion is a choral work—but the choir Bach had in mind was not what most people think of nowadays. Bach performed the Passion with a choir of just eight singers, two singers per part, and those eight singers sang all the solo parts as well, including that of the narrator, the Evangelist. This is exactly how we will score our performance of the Passion. When we use a choir like Bach’s, together with a small orchestra of 18th-century instruments like those he wrote for, the effect is wonderfully direct and personal. Instead of a mass of sound one hears individual lines emerge from the texture with greater clarity, and the soloists, rather than sitting aloof from the action during the chorales and choruses, are full participants in the heart-rending and cathartic events.
                          Learn More about Bach's St. John Passion

Thursday, March 5 at 7 pm, Princeton Public Library

Herr Bach and His Instruments

An introduction to the Baroque instruments Bach wrote for in his St. John Passion, including the viola d'amore, oboe da caccia, viola da gamba, and theorbo.

 

Sunday, March 8, 2020 at 3 pm, Princeton Public Library

"The Musical Aims of Bach's St. John Passion"

A lecture by Michael Marissen, an internationally known Bach scholar

 

Saturday, March 14, 2020 at 3 p.m. at All Saints' Church

 "Troubling Voices in Bach's Sublime St. John Passion "

A panel discussion about the controversial nature of the St. John Passion

with Michael Marissen, Bach scholar

Ellen T. Charry, Professor Emerita at the Princeton Theological Seminary,

and Scott Metcalfe, Baroque musician & conductor
About Scott Metcalfe, director

Scott Metcalfe is the director of Blue Heron, acclaimed by The Boston Globe as “one of the Boston music community’s indispensables” and the winner of the 2018 Gramophone Classical Music Award for Early Music and the 2015 Noah Greenberg Award from the American Musicological Society. Metcalfe is widely recognized as one of North America’s leading specialists in music from the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries and beyond. From 2010-2019 Metcalfe was music director of New York City’s Green Mountain Project (Jolle Greenleaf, artistic director) and he has been guest director of TENET (New York), the Handel & Haydn Society (Boston), Emmanuel Music (Boston), the Tudor Choir and Seattle Baroque, Pacific Baroque Orchestra (Vancouver, BC), Quire Cleveland, the Dryden Ensemble (Princeton, NJ), and Early Music America’s Young Performers Festival Ensemble, in music ranging from Machaut to Bach and Handel. Metcalfe also enjoys a career as a baroque violinist, playing with Les Délices (dir. Debra Nagy), L’Harmonie des Saisons (dir. Eric Milnes), and other ensembles. His scholarly activities include research on the performance practice of English vocal music in the 16th and 17th centuries, some of appears as two chapters in Music, politics, and religion in early seventeenth-century Cambridge: the Peterhouse partbooks in context (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, forthcoming in 2019). He has also edited a motet by Francisco de Peñalosa for Antico Edition and the twelve unique songs in the newly-discovered Leuven chansonnier for the Alamire Foundation (Belgium), and he is preparing a new edition of the songs of Gilles Binchois (c. 1400-1460). Metcalfe received a bachelor’s degree from Brown University (1985), where he majored in biology, and a master’s degree in historical performance practice from Harvard (2005). He has taught at Boston University and Harvard University, has served as director of the baroque orchestra at Oberlin Conservatory, and is a Visiting Professor of Music History at the New England Conservatory in 2019-20.
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