Bach Week Festival: J. S. Bach: Mass in B Minor, BWV 232

Bach’s monumental Mass in B Minor will be the grand finale of the Evanston-based Bach Week Festival’s 50th anniversary and its farewell season.

“It’s truly been a half-century labor of love,” Richard Webster, the festival’s longtime music director, says. “And we’ll conclude this amazing journey with J. S. Bach’s final sacred masterpiece, the incomparable Mass in B Minor, amid joy and gratitude for all who have been part of Bach Week.”

Webster, a nationally prominent church musician, has been the festival’s music director and conductor since 1975.

He performed in and helped organize Evanston’s first Bach Week, May 5-12, 1974, during his senior year at Northwestern University’s School of Music, under his mentor, festival founder Karel Paukert. The latter was associate professor of organ and church music at NU and organist and choirmaster at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Evanston, the festival’s first home.

Shortly after launching Bach Week, Paukert moved to the Cleveland, Ohio, area, where he has enjoyed a long and distinguished music career that continues to this day. He is expected to attend Bach Week’s final concert May 5 at St. Luke’s featuring Bach’s B-Minor Mass.

Artists performing in the B-Minor Mass are:
Josefien Stoppelenburg, soprano
Kathleen Felty, soprano
Susan Platts, contralto
Geoffrey Agpalo, tenor
David Govertsen, bass
North Park University Chamber Singers
Bach Week Festival Orchestra and Chorus
Richard Webster, conductor
Jason Moy, organ