Token Creek Chamber Music Festival: Ripe and Ready for the 29th Time

Opening program of Bach and Primosch is indeed a “harvest”   Any one of the previous incarnations of the Token Creek Chamber Music Festival’s end-of-summer celebrations might have been dubbed “Harvest.” As it happens, it is this year, the 29th go-round of great music, pithy insights and the precious camaraderie shared by a hundred or…

Sono Luminus Label Does It Again…

CD featuring violinist Irina Muresanu as eclectic as it gets   In the space of less than two years, the recording company Sono Luminus (distributed by Naxos) has proven to be the go-to label if you’re looking to break out of a listening rut. One of their latest releases features a violinist few are familiar…

Crying In Our Coffee: Madison Bach Musicians’ Fascinating Double Bill

Trevor Stephenson closes MBM season with light Bach, heavy Purcell The close of the Madison Bach Musicians  season (pictured above in a 2015 performance) gave me the opportunity to cross two famous works off my must-hear list: Bach’s frothy secular cantata, BWV 211 (known rightly as the “Coffee Cantata”), and Purcell’s seminal opera, Dido and…

Bach Would Have Loved This!

Richard Narroway’s new release of the Bach Cello Suites gives us the best of both worlds   Every cellist since Casals (and many before), see the monument staring them in the face: the six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello of Johann Sebastian Bach. Thanks to Pablo Casals’ artistic pioneering over a century ago, the world of…

The Easter Mastery of the Madison Bach Musicians

Bach’s “St. John Passion” is revealed in all its poignant splendor It was over a year ago, when I first experienced the Madison Bach Musicians for the first time (a revelatory Messiah) that I saw they planned performances of J.S.Bach’s “St. John Passion” for Good Friday night and the next in 2017. I was ready…

Token Creek Restored—and at Flood Stage, Musically Speaking

27th season of the Token Creek Chamber Music Festival overflows (artistically) in opening concert One of Madison’s sweetest farewells to summer always occurs at the Festival Barn, the former residence of Rose Mary Harbison’s family dating back to the 1930s. During that decade the ecological gem known as Token Creek was ruined by short-sighted commercial…