2024-2025 Season Overview
Welcome to our 21st season!
Dear Friends,
We are still riding high on the wave of your enthusiastic response and wonderful audience turnout during our 20th anniversary season in 2023-24. Thank you for making it such a success!
For 2024-25—our 21st season—we’re eager to share with you three diverse and thrilling programs. The first two feature repertoire we’ve always wanted to focus on, to wit, the French Baroque Style and music for A 17th-Century German Christmas. The season will then culminate in March with a monumental work we’ve wanted to do again ever since we presented it in 2009—J. S. Bach’s incomparable St. Matthew Passion.
The season starts on September 28 & 29—as the autumn colors return to the prairie at Holy Wisdom Monastery—with an exploration of the French Baroque Style. Guest violinist Marc Destrubé (who led last season’s stunning Vivaldi’s Venice program) returns to lead the MBM strings, joined by guest soprano Sarah Brailey and guest flutist Immanuel Davis, in performing works of utterly French fluidity and grace by Lully, Couperin, Marais, Rameau, and J. S. Bach.
Then, on Saturday afternoon, December 14, in the marvelous acoustics of Madison’s First Congregational Church, MBM will give its 14th annual Baroque Holiday Concert. This year, instrumentalists from MBM and vocalists from the celebrated Bella Voce choir (Evanston, Illinois) will collaborate in performing seasonal masterworks from 17th-century Germany. Join us for A 17th-Century German Christmas, with music by Buxtehude, Praetorius, Hammerschmidt, Geist, Biber, Schmelzer, Schütz, Hassler, and Schein. This program will be performed again on Sunday, December 15, in Evanston.
Madison Bach Musicians’ 2024-25 season will conclude on March 22 & 23 with two all-out performances of J. S. Bach’s matchless St. Matthew Passion. Fittingly, the early music movement itself—which continues to unfold worldwide with enthusiasm and wonder—can be traced back to Felix Mendelssohn’s daring and successful 1829 revival of this very work. We’re delighted that these MBM St. Matthew Passion performances will be held in the beautiful and acoustically spectacular Hamel Music Center, UW-Madison Mead Witter School of Music.
We hope you will subscribe to the Madison Bach Musicians’ 21st season. Steadfast subscribers not only enjoy several benefits, you also sustain our musical efforts. We continue to offer our events in livestream format so that our patrons everywhere can enjoy the concerts. In conjunction with each season event, MBM also continues to provide educational outreach events for schools and for youth music performing organizations.
Trevor Stephenson, MBM Artistic Director
Kangwon Kim, MBM Assistant Artistic Director
