Burlington Baroque Festival: JS Bach B Minor Mass

*Pre-concert panel at 6:30 p.m. - Baroque Artists and their Instruments

Our artists-in-residence showcase their baroque instruments.

Johann Sebastian Bach assembled the monumental B minor Mass in the last years of his life, a compendium of some of his greatest works from across the length of his storied career. He viewed it as a summation of his life's work in sacred music, and had it bound in a volume that would lay ignored for decades. Without question, one of the greatest masterworks in all of Western Music, the variety of styles, rhetorical flourishes, and magnificent orchestrations expand a simple Mass Text into a tour de force baroque composition, never to be rivaled. To hear it with period instruments and a suitably small vocal ensemble is to hear it (unlike most modern performances) as Bach conceived it, an opportunity not to be missed.

Featured soloists are:

Len Torrie, soprano (Montreal)

Myriam Leblanc, soprano (Montreal)

Nicholas Burns, alto (Vancouver)

Philippe Gagné, tenor (Montreal)

Sumner Thomson, bass (Boston)

William Kraushaar,  bass (Montreal)