Johann Sebastian Bach was a Saturday night and Sunday morning kind of guy.
There's a rich tradition of American musicians performing R&B and country in nightclubs and roadhouses before going the gospel route on Sunday morning. Similarly, one of classical music's greatest composers split his time between the sacred and the secular, premiering works at both cathedrals and coffeehouses, maybe even leading some beer hall jam sessions.
The Bach Roots Festival gives a taste of the composer's mix of milieus with performances at craft breweries and churches, stopping at a couple of parks, too. A brainchild of conductor Matthew Olson, the eight-day, seven-concert festival launches Sunday in the Beergarden at Minneapolis' Utepils Brewing, but will replace the rowdiness with reverence by week's end with performances of a cantata and Bach's beautiful "Magnificat."
" 'Bach and Brews' evolved from the same values as our Bach and worship presentations," Olson said from his office at Northfield's Carleton College, where he's director of choral activities. "Bach and a lot of other baroque composers were writing for secular and, even more intriguingly, casual environments. … I wondered what barriers might be reduced if we take that music back into a casual setting, be that a park or an outdoor beer garden, like we're doing this summer.
"I've been so fascinated by how composers like [Henry] Purcell took time out of their presumably busy lives to write casual drinking songs that he and friends performed together at the back of taverns for fun."
While a doctoral student at the University of Minnesota in 2012, Olson founded the Oratory Bach Ensemble, a group that mixed music and theology by performing Bach cantatas as part of worship services. But Bach was readily available in the Twin Cities, with such groups as the Minnesota Bach Ensemble, the Bach Society of Minnesota and Lyra Baroque often offering his works. So Olson settled upon the niche of a summer festival and Bach Roots was born.
"My first musical upbringing was as a singer-songwriter who played guitar and sang with a group," Olson said. "The leader taught me so much about American folk music, humbly and reverently serving these songs of past generations, but always trying to make them new and relevant today. And that's what we want to do with the Bach Roots Festival: a reverence for the past, but relevance to the present."
The liturgy/concert combo lives on in the festival's Wednesday evening "Vespers" service featuring a cantata and other vocal and organ music. ("Non-Lutherans welcome," Olson said.) But the Oratory Ensemble established a reputation for going big, as it performed two of Bach's magnum opuses, the "St. John Passion" and the Mass in B Minor, in 2019. The festival's grand finale is Bach's "Magnificat," preceded by a setting of the same text from the composer's predecessor as minister of music in Leipzig, Germany, Johann Kuhnau.
