The Bethlehem Bach Festival: A Choir Insider's View

For me, and a few thousand other people who share my devotion, May in Bethlehem means one thing: Bach Festival.

For 104 years, singers, instrumentalists and audiences have converged on Lehigh University campus during two weekends in May to perform, listen to, contemplate and be buoyed up by the astounding music of Johann Sebastian Bach.

The Bach Choir of Bethlehem, currently under the leadership of Artistic Director & Conductor Greg Funfgeld, was founded to promote an appreciation for Bach’s music. Over the years the Choir’s reputation for musical excellence has grown considerably, as has its performance schedule. But the annual Festival remains the capstone of the group’s activities.

The Festival includes several choir and instrumental concerts, a scholarly lecture, luncheon and a dinner discussion, all programmed for Friday and Saturday. The repertoire on Friday changes each year (Bach’s output was prodigious), but the work performed on Saturday afternoon is always the musically and spirituality robust Mass in B Minor. This cycle of events is repeated on the following weekend for additional audiences.

To think of the Festival merely as a series of concerts, however, would do a disservice to this cultural phenomenon. Among those who care, Bach Festival is a destination and an occasion-- one to which pilgrims look forward every year with great anticipation. Many patrons have been coming to the Festival faithfully for 30, 40, even 50 or more years.

Last weekend, on a short stretch of Packer Avenue , the main road through Lehigh campus, the license plates on parked cars of Festival goers showed the distances they had come: from New York , New Jersey, Maryland, District of Columbia, Ohio, Virginia, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Vermont.

For devoted audience members, the appeal of the Festival lies foremost in the extraordinary depth and genius of Bach’s musical compositions, and also in the choir’s unwaveringly high musical standards fostered by Funfgeld.

At present, approximately 95 singers are members of the Bach Choir. Entrance is by audition only and the singers volunteer their time. For twenty years I have had the privilege of singing soprano in the Bach Choir. The thrill of belonging to this group is the consistent expectation of excellence. Although we blend our voices as a unified choir, each person takes personal responsibility for every note.

A year in the life of a Bach Choir member is busy. Rehearsals are every Monday night from September to May. Formal performances include a pair of Christmas concerts, a Family Concert designed especially to engage young people, a Spring Concert, and occasional run-out concerts to nearby cities. On the second Tuesday of seven months of the year, the choir offers a free noon-time concert at Central Moravian Church as a “gift of music and spiritual refreshment” to the community. On four days of the year, a small contingent of the choir travels to schools in the Lehigh Valley and beyond to present interactive assembly programs. So far 85,000 students have been introduced to J.S. Bach and his music.

The choir has also had the honor of going on concert tour to Germany and the United Kingdom, and performing by invitation at Carnegie Hall and Kennedy Center.

As budgets and schedules allow, the Bach Choir produces recordings, typically every few years. This season, however, conditions were right to do two recordings, an ambitious undertaking. Scheduling considerations dictated that the recording of Bach’s monumental St. John Passion be done during the week between the Festival weekends—this week.

This required another major commitment from the choir members, and three more nights away from family after full days at work. Recording sessions are intense and repetitious by necessity. The choir may sing a section of music ten times to achieve one perfect take. What makes the sessions rewarding, rather than draining, however, is experiencing the singleness of purpose of the singers and orchestra members. Every successive take is an effort to not just repeat the music, but to strive for perfection--in pitch, diction, tempo, phrasing, intensity and spirit. Funfgeld or the recording engineers can ask for subtle, precise vocal adjustments, and the choir immediately responds. Every nuance can be captured.

So after nine hours of painstakingly recording the St. John Passion this week, the Bach Choir will take to the stage again this weekend, eager to express its musical passion. For a singer, there’s a comforting reassurance in looking out into the audience and seeing familiar faces from previous years. Bach Festival audiences are exceedingly discerning and unrestrained in their love of Bach. They notice everything. The tension of a deliberate dissonance. The careful inflection of an oft-heard passage. The pure exuberance of Bach’s no-holds-barred contrapuntal writing.

For the 104th time at Bach Festival, there will be uplifting choruses and calming chorales. The trumpets will play a crisp, soaring line, and listeners will smile. A soloist will pause at the end of a phrase, and time will momentarily stand still. The choir will sing with fervor about the crucifixion, and with explosive conviction about the resurrection. And when all the emotion of Bach’s music is crystallized into the final “Dona Nobis Pacem” of the Mass, Packer Church will be filled with the cumulative spirit of generations of choir members and Festival goers. We are not the first, nor will we be the last of those who come together in Bethlehem to share the music of Bach.

Editor's Note: The Bethlehem Bach Festival continues this weekend, with performances today at 4:30 p.m. and 8 p.m. at the Packer Memorial Church on Lehigh University's campus. Go to bach.org for more information.