DECATUR — The Five Cities Baroque Festival is back for its third year. Singers and musicians will perform across Central Illinois in Champaign, Decatur, and Springfield to celebrate the western classical music from the 17th and 18th centuries.
IPM’s Morning Edition host Kimberly Schofield caught up with the festival’s founding director, Nate Widelitz, about new elements in this year’s festival and what he has learned from its past success.
This interview has been edited for clarity and conciseness.
NATE WIDELITZ: That first festival was really kind of an experiment, you know. So we started off smaller than we are. Now, I wouldn’t necessarily call it small, but we had just a weekend of music. We had three concerts packed into 24 hours over a weekend. I mean, I think that the idea was, ‘let’s put something together, see how it goes,’ and it was just a really great success and so that really encouraged us to go bigger in our second year.
KIMBERLY SCHOFIELD: Nate, I want to talk a little bit about the events. What kicks off the festival?
WIDELITZ: So we are starting with a very special, new kind of festival opening this year. We’re going to be performing a couple of Bach cantatas during Sunday morning mass at the Chapel of St John the Divine in Champaign. It does happen to be Trinity Sunday, which is one of the special Sundays in the Christian year. And Bach happened to write a couple of cantatas specifically for this annual commemoration. And so we’re going to be performing two of the cantatas he wrote for Trinity Sunday. The first is “Cantata 165 – O heilges Geist- und Wasserbad.” And then the other one is “Cantata 176 – Es ist ein trotzig und verzagt Ding,” talking about the defiance and the despondence of the heart of man. Bach cantatas are really well known. They all have a very specific theological message and so matching them to the specific holiday is kind of cool.
SCHOFIELD: And then there are other events that — I don’t know if themes is the appropriate term to call them, but already it kicked off on Sunday with a theme that I didn’t even know was happening. So what else can people expect for the week? And then, of course, it’s going to be Juneteenth on that Thursday.
WIDELITZ: That’s right, yeah. One thing that really worked about our new week-long format last year was that expanding that much allowed us to do a bunch of very different kinds of events. So there really is something for everyone and that was one of the really strong developments that we had. So we’re going to keep that for this year.
Monday night of festival week, we have five of our region’s best musicians performing music that would have been heard at the court of Frederick the Great of Prussia, who was a very well known and famous lover of music. He himself learned to play the flute from the famous composer, Quantz. And so there will be some music that was written for him, on that program, as well as music by some of his contemporaries.
Tuesday night of festival week, we shift to Decatur. And one of the really exciting new things for this year is that our Young Artist program, which we started last year, they’re going to have their own recital for the first time and we’re very excited about that. These are four very, very talented early-career singers who are recently out of college and just kind of striking out onto their careers. Now, they’re going to get their own recital on Tuesday.
On Wednesday of festival week, we have our resident artists for the week. This is also something new that we have this year. We have resident artists that are going to be working in some way on most of the events throughout the week. They are going to have their own recital right in the middle of the week there. So everything kind of revolves around that.
Thursday, as you mentioned, we have our Juneteenth event. We are very excited about this. We have commissioned one of our jazz musicians that’s associated with the festival, David Moore, to turn another of Bach cantatas, “Cantata 140” into a series of jazz charts. It’s gonna be really great. I’ve seen the charts that he’s done a really great job with them. And he’s gonna talk about how the contributions of the African American musical community to really establishing and building the jazz idiom reaches back to some Baroque practices, actually. So we have that connection going on.
Friday night, as last year, we have our Youth Academy students finishing off their week in residence with a recital. Since June 20th is the Summer Solstice, I had the idea that they should perform a set of music that was written for the court of the Sun King Louis XIV of France. We’re talking about the late 1600s here and so they’re going to be performing music there.
And as last year, we save our biggest and boldest concert for the end of the week on Saturday night. That’s going to be Mozart’s “Davide penitente” and Marianna Martine’s “Dixit Dominus” at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Springfield.
SCHOFIELD: Is there something that you learned from the previous years that either worked really well or that you want to continue implementing? It sounds like there are a lot of new endeavors taking place.
WIDELITZ: Yeah. I mean, one of my favorite things about this process of establishing and building the festival has been iterating – to use startup language, you know. I mean, we really are still a startup. We’re small and scrappy and new, and I think we have that energy going on, which I really appreciate. One of the things that worked really well last year in going to this week-long format was that it allows for us to scratch just so many different musical itches. And so we are sticking with that concept, and I think we really intend to off into the future. You know, the more variety you can put in front of folks, the more accessible it all becomes. We haven’t had resident artists who were in residence for the entire festival before. We’re very excited about giving our young artists a bigger, more prominent role to play in the festival, and we are very excited about expanding into some different kinds of venues as well.
SCHOFIELD: What would you say to people who are interested in coming to the festival? Perhaps they’ve gone in the past two years…and to people who have never experienced Baroque music before?
WIDELITZ: If you’ve never experienced Baroque music, you are very likely to be surprised by what you hear. I absolutely fell in love with this kind of music, partly because it is so surprising. You know, we think about a lot of eras in in the development of Western classical music, and we have our ideas about what they might sound like. And I think Baroque music, this music from the 17th and early 18th centuries is probably the most surprising of all the eras. It was kind of the Wild West of you know, this new tonal practice, and so depending on the composer, you’ll get a lot of different things that you may not have been expecting.
All Five Cities Baroque Festival events are free and open to the public. For information on sponsors, artists and the schedule visit fivecitiesbaroque.org.