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This year’s festival — June 27 through July 12 — will include multiple West Coast premieres, an examination of what American classical music looks like and, of course, plenty of Johann Sebastian Bach.
The Oregon Bach Festival and the University of Oregon School of Music and Dance has announced the lineup for its 2026 festival, a robust season of music including an all-Johann Sebastian Bach Concert and a focus on Bach’s time writing secular cantatas in the university town of Leipzig.
Here’s a rundown of some major themes of this year’s festival, which starts Saturday, June 27, and runs through July 12. Two major anniversaries inspired much of the programming: 250 years since the Declaration of Independence and the 150th year for the University of Oregon.
Colleges and music
For the UO sesquicentennial, festival programming features multiple concerts specifically connecting to the interplay between the collegiate experience and classical music.
In “Cantatas on Campus,” festival artistic partner Jos van Veldhoven will conduct an evening of cantatas that Bach composed while in Leipzig, where the composer spent time in coffeehouses and gatherings of the local musical society. The concert will include “The Contest Between Phoebus and Pan” and Vereinigte Zwietracht der wechselnden Saiten, two of Bach’s secular cantatas — departures from his oeuvre of hundreds of religious pieces composed for churches.
Then, there’s “Confessions of a Law School Dropout,” a concert focused on the Baroque composer G.P. Telemann who, true to the title, left his legal studies to follow his musical passions. The concert will be performed by the painstakingly period-accurate Berwick Academy for Historically Informed Performance.
A focus on American music
Multiple concerts in the festival highlight music written in America — both from the classical catalog as well as newer work.
The theme begins with “Beyond Borders,” a June 28 concert focused on pieces from composers who were displaced by war: Czech composers Bohuslav Martinů’s Nonet No. 2, Arnold Schoenberg’s arrangement of Gustav Mahler’s “Songs of a Wayfarer,” the West Coast premiere of Milad Yousufi’s “Humanity,” and Darius Milhaud’s “The Creation of the World.”
Two days later, “Voices of Our Land,” a collaboration with the nonprofit Chamber Music Northwest, will present an evening of music “dedicated to the traditions, cultures and voices that merge to create American heritage,” per the press release. The June 30 program includes Antonín Dvořák’s String Quintet in E-flat Major, Op. 97 (one of the pieces the Czech composer wrote while in the United States), Henry Cowell’s “Set of Five” and the festival’s composer-in-residence Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate’s “Pisachi (Reveal).”
On July 2, “American Symphonies” will see artistic partner Ken-David Masur pair Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony with the West Coast premiere of Tate’s “American Indian Symphony,” a work shaped by Indigenous story and tradition that is sung in six languages.
Then, a week later on July 9, the theme continues with “American Tapestry,” where conductors Gemma New and Anton Armstrong present a night of contemporary American music, including George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” Margaret Bonds’ “Credo,” and Aaron Copland’s “The Tender Land” suites and an abridged portion of his “Appalachian Spring” suite.
Bach-focused concerts and how to get tickets
Hardcore Bach fans will not be disappointed by the rest of the festival lineup. Highlights for Bach listeners include:
- “Mendelssohn’s 1840 All-Bach Program,” a recreation of an 1840 concert where the German composer and musician Felix Mendelssohn played an evening of Bach’s organ music as part of a campaign to revive interest in the older composer. The concert is the project of Grammy-winning organist Paul Jacobs.
- Pianist-composer Dan Tepfer’s two concerts, “Bach: Inventions/Reinventions,” where he reimagines 15 of Bach’s “Inventions” in real time through “improvisation and algorithmic interplay,” and “Bach’s Living Room,” where he’ll be joined by the flutist Emi Ferguson for a “sunny, summer morning of duets.”
- “An Evening with Chris Thile,” where the Grammy-winner and MacArthur “Genius” Grant fellow will play selections from his solo recordings of Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas, a “post-genre blend of compositional rigor, folksy stagecraft, and improvisational brilliance.”
The full schedule for the festival — including a visit from Grammy-award winning vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth and a concert at a Benedictine abbey — is on the Bach Festival website. Tickets for concerts go on sale April 1 at 10 a.m.
