GREAT BARRINGTON — The Berkshire Bach Society wisely postponed their New Year’s shows as COVID cases continued to rise in December. It was a big disappointment at the time, the Bach at New Year’s performances being a tradition going back almost 30 years. But no one was exactly dreading the prospect of hearing the Brandenburg concerti performed on any one of three gorgeous days in May:
- May 27 at 6 p.m. — Saint James Place, Great Barrington
- May 28 at 3 p.m. — Troy Savings Bank Music Hall, Troy, New York
- May 29 at 3 p.m. — Academy of Music, Northampton
These performances are dedicated in memoriam to the late Kenneth Cooper, the Society’s Music Director Emeritus, who passed away in March, 2021. Cooper’s successor, nine-time Grammy Award winner and founding member of the Emerson String Quartet, Eugene Drucker, has been Music Director of Bach at New Year’s since 2017, and last fall, before the New Year’s shows were postponed, I asked him how he felt about finally getting this production in front of a live audience again. Here is his reply, which still makes sense in 2022:
“We feel privileged to share the great musical legacy of Bach once again in live concerts. I’ve long thought that music of true depth and emotional range invites each listener into a private space where an intimate connection with great minds and spirits of the past becomes possible.
“In a public setting, there is also the sense of a communal experience, in which performers and members of the audience are caught up simultaneously in the same trajectory of drama, pathos and joy.
“After the multiple uncertainties of the past two years, during which we’ve all been forced to reevaluate every aspect of our existence, I can think of no better way to celebrate this holiday than in the company of J.S. Bach.”
If you are even a little bit familiar with Bach’s music, then at one time or another you have probably experienced the joy he managed to infuse into everything he created. It’s such an essential ingredient that when Drucker speaks of “intimate connection with great minds and spirits of the past,” we know he’s talking about, among other things, joy.
I asked the Berkshires’ favorite Tanglewood pre-concert lecturer, Prof. Jeremy Yudkin, what Bach’s music can mean to a world gone mad, a world where joy and human kindness both seem to be in short supply. He begins at the beginning, with the value of art itself:
“Why do we need art — music, literature, dance, drama, paintings? Because art orders our existence, reassures us that a decent life is within our reach, expresses meanings that we can not possibly say in words.
“And, of all the composers, it is Bach who presents to us an orderly world — not a regimented one, but one in which everything is in its proper place, and the surprises within it delight, intrigue, and fascinate us along the way.”
