BACH CELEBRATION

Friday, March 21, 2025 at 7:30 pm

Saturday, March 22, 2025 at 7:30 pm

Sunday, March 23, 2025 at 2:30 pm

ALLEN-BRADLEY HALL

Ken-David Masur, conductor

Dashon Burton, bass-baritone

Kevin Pearl, oboe

Jeanyi Kim, violin

Jinwoo Lee, violin

Sonora Slocum, flute

Heather Zinninger, flute

PROGRAM

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH

Concerto in C minor for Violin, Oboe, and String Orchestra, BWV 1060R

I. Allegro

II. Adagio

III. Allegro

Kevin Pearl, oboe

Jeanyi Kim, violin

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH

Cantata No. 82, “Ich habe genug,” BWV 82

Cantata No. 82, “Ich habe genug,” BWV 82

I. Aria: Ich habe genug

II. Recitative: Ich habe genug

III. Aria: Schlummert ein, ihr matten Augen

IV. Recitative: Mein Gott! wenn kömmt das schöne: Nun!

V. Aria: Ich freue mich auf meinen Tod

Dashon Burton, bass-baritone

INTERMISSION

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH

Brandenburg Concerto No. 4 in G major, BWV 1049

I. Allegro

II. Andante

III. Presto

Jinwoo Lee, violin

Sonora Slocum, flute

Heather Zinninger, flute

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH

Suite No. 4 in D major for Orchestra, BWV 1069

I. Ouverture

II. Bourrée I – Bourrée II

III. Gavotte

IV. Menuet I – Menuet II

V. Réjouissance

The 2024.25 Classics Series is presented by the UNITED PERFORMING ARTS FUND and ROCKWELL AUTOMATION. The Bach Festival is sponsored by the WE ENERGIES FOUNDATION. The length of this concert is approximately 1 hour and 45 minutes. All programs are subject to change.

Guest Artist Biographies

KEVIN PEARL

Kevin Pearl is the assistant principal oboe of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, a position he assumed in the fall of 2015. Prior to his appointment in Milwaukee, Pearl was a member of the New World Symphony in Miami Beach, Florida, and toured with the orchestra to the Harris Theater, the Kennedy Center, and Carnegie Hall. During the summer, he is the oboe faculty member at Festival Napa Valley, and he performs regularly with the Grant Park Orchestra, the Mainly Mozart All-Star Orchestra, and the Lakes Area Music Festival, with whom he performed Richard Strauss’s oboe concerto in 2016. He is also the First Prize winner of the inaugural Double Reed Society’s Young Artist Competition.

As a chamber musician, Pearl was featured on the New World Symphony’s chamber series with a performance of Mozart’s piano quintet with pianist Garrick Ohlsson and as a guest soloist on Joan Tower’s Island Prelude. Outside of the traditional classical music paradigm, he writes and records with composer and producer Nathaniel Wolkstein, incorporating the oboe and English horn into symphonically-infused popular music.

With a passion for teaching, Pearl maintains a private studio in Milwaukee and coaches the woodwind sections for the Milwaukee Youth Symphony’s top three orchestras. He has given masterclasses at the University of Miami and the Mainly Mozart Festival, coached at the New World Symphony, and served on the faculty of Wisconsin Lutheran College.

Born and raised in Coral Springs, Florida, Pearl received a Bachelor of Music degree from the Eastman School of Music and a Master of Music degree from the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University. His primary teachers are Richard Killmer, Robert Atherholt, and Robert Weiner, with additional mentorship from Elaine Douvas, Richard Woodhams, and Nathan Hughes. When he’s not playing the oboe, Pearl enjoys spending time with his cat Niyla, playing video games, and making his friends laugh.

JEANYI KIM

Jeanyi Kim is the associate concertmaster of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra and concertmaster of Milwaukee Musaik. A Toronto native, Kim’s command as a violinist has brought her to illustrious venues around the world, including Carnegie Hall, the Barbican Centre, Salle Pleyel, and the Concertgebouw. As a guest, she has appeared as assistant leader of the London Symphony Orchestra under Sir Colin Davis and Valery Gergiev, concertmaster of the Kalamazoo Symphony Orchestra, principal second violin of the National Arts Centre Orchestra, and substitute musician of the Philadelphia Orchestra. The Journal Sentinel has praised her performances, drawing likeness to that of “a glamorous international star,” and her playing has been described as “engrossing…intelligent,” and simultaneously having “easy grace” (Journal Sentinel) and “fistfuls of technical fireworks” (Urban Milwaukee).

Recent solo appearances include performances with the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, Milwaukee Musaik, Sunflower Music Festival Orchestra, and the Kenosha and Sheboygan symphony orchestras. A passionate and energetic chamber musician, Kim is a founding member of the Philomusica Quartet and is a regular artist at the esteemed Sunflower Music Festival. She has performed in a number of prominent chamber music series, including Frankly Music, Dame Myra Hess, Fine Arts at First, and Searl Pickett, as well as on radio broadcasts for Wisconsin Public Radio, WFMT Chicago, and Kansas Public Radio. In addition, she serves as vice president of the Board of Milwaukee Musaik.

A dedicated teacher, Kim has held faculty positions at various institutions, including University of Wisconsin-Parkside and University of New Haven, and during summers has taught at several festivals, including the Eleazar de Carvalho International Music Festival and the Elm City ChamberFest. Under her guidance, many of her students have gone on to win various prizes and honors. Her major teachers include Erick Friedman, Kyung Yu, Rebecca Henry, and Berl Senofsky, and important mentors include Aldo and Elizabeth Parisot, Sidney Harth, and the Tokyo String Quartet. As a graduate student at Yale, she served as a teaching assistant to Erick Friedman. Kim holds a DMA from Yale University, where she also earned her BA, MM, and MMA degrees. As an undergraduate, Kim was the recipient of the Bach Society Award.

Kim recorded for a Boosey & Hawkes compilation entitled 10 Violin Solos from the Masters, released by Hal Leonard. She performs on a 1705 Petrus Guarnerius violin.

Burton’s 2024-25 season began with Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl led by Gustavo Dudamel. Highlights throughout the season include returns to the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra for the second season as artistic partner for Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen and Bach’s Ich habe genug, both led by Ken-David Masur; his Boston Symphony subscription debut with Michael Tilson Thomas’s Walt Whitman Songs led by Teddy Abrams; his Toronto Symphony debut in the Mozart Requiem led by Jukka-Pekka Saraste; the Brahms-Glanert Serious Songs and the Mozart Requiem with the St. Louis Symphony led by Stéphane Denève; the Mozart Requiem with the Minnesota Orchestra and Thomas Søndergård; and Handel’s Messiah with the National Symphony led by Masaki Suzuki.

DASHON BURTON

Hailed as an artist “alight with the spirit of the music” (Boston Globe), threetime Grammy winning bass-baritone Dashon Burton has established a vibrant career, appearing regularly throughout the U.S. and Europe.

Burton’s 2024-25 season began with Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl led by Gustavo Dudamel. Highlights throughout the season include returns to the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra for the second season as artistic partner for Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen and Bach’s Ich habe genug, both led by Ken-David Masur; his Boston Symphony subscription debut with Michael Tilson Thomas’s Walt Whitman Songs led by Teddy Abrams; his Toronto Symphony debut in the Mozart Requiem led by Jukka-Pekka Saraste; the Brahms-Glanert Serious Songs and the Mozart Requiem with the St. Louis Symphony led by Stéphane Denève; the Mozart Requiem with the Minnesota Orchestra and Thomas Søndergård; and Handel’s Messiah with the National Symphony led by Masaki Suzuki.

Burton’s 2023-24 season included multiple appearances with Michael Tilson Thomas, including a performance of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 with the San Francisco Symphony and Copland’s Old American Songs with the New World Symphony. Burton also performed Bach’s Christmas Oratorio with the Washington Bach Consort, Handel’s Messiah with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the title role in Sweeney Todd at Vanderbilt University. With the Cleveland Orchestra, Burton sang in a semi-staged version of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, and he joined the Milwaukee Symphony and Ken-David Masur for three subscription weeks as their artistic partner.

A multiple award-winning singer, Burton won his second Grammy Award in March 2021 for Best Classical Solo Vocal Album with his performance featured in Dame Ethyl Smyth’s masterwork The Prison with The Experiential Orchestra (Chandos). As an original member of the groundbreaking vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth, he won his first Grammy Award in 2013 for their inaugural recording of all new commissions and his third Grammy Award in 2024 for their most recent recording, Rough Magic, featuring more new commissions from Caroline Shaw, William Brittelle, Peter Shin, and Eve Beglarian.

His other recordings include Songs of Struggle & Redemption: We Shall Overcome (Acis); the Grammy Award-nominated recording of Paul Moravec’s Sanctuary Road (Naxos); Holocaust, 1944 by Lori Laitman (Acis); and Caroline Shaw’s The Listeners with the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra. His album of spirituals garnered high praise and was singled out by The New York Times as “profoundly moving … a beautiful and lovable disc.”

Burton received a Bachelor of Music degree from Oberlin College and Conservatory, and a Master of Music degree from Yale University’s Institute of Sacred Music. He is an assistant professor of voice at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music.

Program notes by David Jensen

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH

Died 28 July 1750; Leipzig, Germany

Concerto in C minor for Violin, Oboe, and String Orchestra, BWV

Composed: Unknown; possibly during Bach’s years at Köthen (17171723); version for two harpsichords arranged circa 1736

First performance: Unknown; reconstruction for oboe and violin by Max Seiffert published in 1920; arrangement for two violins by Max Schneider premiered on 20 June 1920; Adolf Busch, violin; Edgar Wollgandt, violin; Leipzig Bach Festival

Instrumentation: harpsichord; strings

Approximate duration: 16 minutes

Comparatively little is known for certain about the concerto for violin and oboe. There are no extant manuscripts of it in its original form, and what audiences will hear in the course of this performance is itself a reconstruction derived from Bach’s subsequent arrangement for two harpsichords, which he produced sometime around 1735-1740. It is likely that the first version was composed during his years in Köthen, where his appointment to Prince Leopold (a Calvinist with little use for sacred music) resulted in a rich variety of instrumental music, including the ever-popular Brandenburg concerti and the orchestral suites.

That the surviving iteration left to us is for two harpsichords isn’t unusual. Nearly all of Bach’s keyboard concerti were reimaginings of earlier pieces for varying instrumental forces, and while scholarship has roundly concluded that Bach regularly refashioned his own (and others’) music to that end, the problem of working out the exact motivations and performing circumstances for these transcriptions persists. It is unlikely that Bach wrote much, if any, of his instrumental music with an eye toward posterity, and the dearth of source documents has decidedly muddied the musicological waters.

In 1874, the Bach-Gesellschaft (“Bach Society”), then in its infancy, published an edition of the double harpsichord concerto with a preface by musicologist Wilhelm Rust suggesting that it had initially been written for two violins in D minor. Twelve years later, Woldemar Voigt, a German physicist and Bach scholar, asserted that it had been intended for violin and oboe, basing his claim in part on a 1764 entry for a lost concerto in the catalog of the Leipzig publisher Breitkopf. It wasn’t until 1920 that Max Seiffert would publish his setting in C minor for that particular combination, making it entirely possible that the “original” went unheard for more than a century.

The concerto represents the peak of Bach’s creative energies during his time Köthen, modelled closely upon the Italianate concerto form perfected by Antonio Vivaldi (whose concerti Bach studied and recast for keyboard on multiple occasions). The theme of the Allegro is subject to contrapuntal and harmonic transformation before returning to its first rendition, while the slow middle movement carefully intertwines the two solo lines in intimate, imitative counterpoint. The lively ritornello (“little return”) of the final movement calls to mind the duple rhythm of the bourrée, with each soloist elaborating upon the primary material in-between appearances of the original motive.

Cantata No. 82, “Ich habe genug,” BWV 82

Composed: 1727; revised 1731, 1735, and 1747

First performance: 2 February 1727; St. Nicholas Church, Leipzig, Germany

Last MSO performance: MSO Premiere

Instrumentation: oboe; English horn; harpsichord; organ; strings

Approximate duration: 22 minutes

When Bach was appointed Thomaskantor — or director of church music in Leipzig — in 1723, he was charged with furnishing four churches with a continuous supply of new music. He had already spent several years of his career serving as Konzertmeister at the Weimar court composing church cantatas on a monthly basis, but with his arrival in the post he would hold for the last 27 years of his life, he was expected to provide a cantata for every Sunday and feast day of the Lutheran calendar. During the first few years of his employment there, he is estimated to have written an entirely new cantata every week, a testament to his prodigious ability to cultivate and shape new ideas.

The cantata Ich habe genug (“I have enough”) was composed for the Feast of the Purification of Mary, so called (according to the gospel narrative) for Mary’s ritual purification 40 days after childbirth as she and Joseph presented the newborn Jesus at the Temple in Jerusalem. The prescribed readings for the feast day came from the Book of Malachi and the Gospel of Luke, and the cantata’s libretto, most likely written by Bach’s pupil Christoph Birkmann, is based on the Song of Simeon found in the second chapter of Luke. Promised by the Holy Ghost that he wouldn’t die before witnessing the Messiah, Simeon encountered the baby Jesus at Jerusalem, and, taking him into his arms, faced his death as a joyous emancipation from our mortal foibles: Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word: For mine eyes have seen thy salvation, Which thou hast prepared before the face of all people; A light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel.

Scored for bass, oboe, strings, and continuo — with the singer almost certainly intended as a representation of Simeon himself — the music’s meditative quality underscores Bach’s capacity for skillfully illuminating the atmosphere and character of a given text. Bach revised the cantata several times in the years following its first performance and even crafted a transcription for soprano, and the central aria, “Schlummert ein, ihr matten Augen” (“fall into slumber, you languid eyes”), appears in one of the notebooks of Anna Magdalena Bach, his second wife, who was herself a singer by trade. Both are an indication that he thought highly of it, and rightfully so: the music remains some of Bach’s most popular, with over 200 recordings in circulation.

Brandenburg Concerto No. 4 in G major, BWV 1049

Composed: Unknown; possibly 1719-1720

First performance: Unknown; collection dedicated on 24 March 1721

Last MSO performance: 26 February 1989; Zdeněk Mácal, conductor; J. Patrick Rafferty, violin; Janet Millard de Roldán, flute; Judith Ormond, flute

Instrumentation: harpsichord; strings

Approximate duration: 17 minutes

Frequently recognized as one of the most industrious composers of his time, Bach made positively herculean efforts in his attempts to get ahead in the world. In 1719, he visited and performed for Christian Ludwig, the Margrave of Brandenburg-Schwedt, while traveling to Berlin to purchase a new harpsichord on behalf of his employer, Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Köthen; the Margrave, apparently taken by Bach’s efforts, was inspired enough to request that he send

him some of his compositions. Bach, perhaps reading the invitation as a prospect for better employment (or at least princely remuneration), responded two years after the fact with some of the most sublime music of the Baroque era. There is, unfortunately, no evidence to suggest that Ludwig so much as acknowledged his efforts.

As with many of Bach’s instrumental works, it is difficult to determine precisely when the Brandenburg concerti were composed, but what is known is that he took the trouble to copy each of the six in his own hand when submitting them along with a letter of dedication to Christian Ludwig dated 24 March 1721. The music itself was neither entirely new nor written expressly for the Margrave, but a sort of compilation derived from sinfonias, cantatas, and other pieces written as early as 1713. The title page of the collection describes the six concertos as being for “several instruments,” which is a disservice to the innovation Bach displayed in organizing each concerto’s instrumental forces.

The concerto grosso form, having then reached a peak of development and popularity, featured two groupings of instruments: the concertino (“little ensemble,” or the group of soloists) and the ripieno (“stuffing,” or the orchestral players), and each of the six Brandenburg concerti featured a distinct — and somewhat unusual — combination of soloists. The fourth concerto is written for a concertino of violin and two flutes, although Bach’s designation for fiauti d’echo (“echo flutes”) has remained something of a puzzle for contemporary performers, who typically realize this indication with recorders or modern instruments.

The music itself more closely resembles an Italian violin concerto, with the technical bravura of the outer movements offering the violinist ample opportunity for showmanship. The pensive inner Andante provides contrast in the relative key of E minor, structured as a call-and-response between the ripieno and the flutists as the violin assumes a supporting role by furnishing the soloists with a simple bassline. More than a decade after his letter to Ludwig, Bach, who was by nature as economical as possible with every bit of his oeuvre, rearranged the work as a harpsichord concerto.

Suite No. 4 in D major for Orchestra, BWV 1069

Composed: Unknown; possibly during Bach’s years at Köthen (1717-1723)

First performance: Unknown

Last MSO performance: 5 October 1964; Harry John Brown, conductor

Instrumentation: 3 oboes; bassoon; 3 trumpets; timpani; harpsichord; strings

Approximate duration: 18 minutes

The orchestral suites are an anomaly in Bach’s catalog. His contemporary, Georg Philipp Telemann, is known to have composed hundreds of them, but only four of Bach’s remain to us. They were originally styled as ouvertures, a conscious nod to French operatic tradition, and unlike his more intellectually rigorous music, characterized by its dense textures and sophisticated polyphonic interplay, they essentially stand as collections of light (albeit beautifully contrived) dance music. French culture and musical practice were immensely popular across the continent during the eighteenth century, and Bach, being in possession of a staggering musical intellect, was quick to integrate foreign musical vernacular into his own work.

The practice of grouping together disparate dance forms had been established decades before Bach took up his pen. The seventeenth-century keyboard virtuoso Johann Jakob Froberger is typically identified as having codified the convention of gathering tonally unified dances into a single suite, which usually included an allemande, courante, sarabande, and gigue, a pattern that Bach had followed closely in his cello suites and keyboard partitas. What was unique to Bach’s orchestral settings was the inclusion of a French overture as the first movement: derived from the customs of French opera, the overture was built upon a ternary (or three-part) form,

with a slow, regal introduction (marked by the use of dotted rhythms) followed by a faster contrapuntal episode before returning to the opening statement.

The fourth suite was likely written during his time at the court of Köthen, although this is impossible to confirm, as the original source has been lost. The earliest documentation we have of its existence is its adaptation for the Christmas cantata Unser Mund sei voll Lachens (“May our mouth be full of laughter”), written at Leipzig in 1725. The first sources of the suite in its definitive form are individual parts from around 1730, when Bach was busy leading the Collegium Musicum. It is the most richly orchestrated of the four suites, though scholars have speculated that the inclusion of trumpets and timpani came with the integration of the music into the cantata. The bourrée, gavotte, and menuet, each dances of French origin, are included, and it is the only suite to include a movement titled Réjouissance, a celebratory title found later in Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks.