When this year’s festival orchestra, made up of 63 professional musicians from a dozen states, gathered June 9-16 at 91����Ƶ (91����Ƶ) in Harrisonburg, Va., it was like a family reunion. The musicians keep coming back. “This festival operates on the loyalty principle,” said Hartman.

The festival musicians are “crazy busy,” he said, as they get ready to perform the first Sunday afternoon and then three times the next weekend. Some of them play in smaller groupings at one of the noon concerts during the week in downtown Harrisonburg. Hartman joined a cellist and pianist on Monday to perform a contemporary piece by Paquito D’Rivera.

Hartman played in rock bands during his growing-up years. After he discovered the violin he went on to earn a college degree in violin at the North Carolina School of the Arts.

This year’s festival opened with five concertos presented in the 17th-century Baroque style, with a smaller orchestra and most of the members standing. , founder, artistic director, and conductor of the Bach Festival, explained to the audience what was going on. The first piece, by Arcangelo Corelli, was performed by a core of three featured musicians surrounded by 12 others. There was no conductor. “This is the simplest visual presentation of a concerto,” said Nafziger, who is a longtime 91����Ƶ music professor. “It’s interactive, like watching a tennis match.”

Each year the festival features the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, the prolific 18^th-century German composer, along with one or two others. This year the others were 19^th-century composer Giuseppe Verdi of Italy and 20^th-century composer Benjamin Britten of England.

The second major concert at this year’s festival featured seven popular arias from Verdi’s operas, sung by this year’s internationally known soloists – soprano Veronica Chapman-Smith, tenor Kenneth Gayle, mezzo-soprano Heidi Kurtz, and baritone Grant Youngblood. The concert also included Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 1 and Britten’s “Four Sea Interludes” from the opera Peter Grimes, which was first performed in the newly re-opened opera house of London after World War II.

Festival Concert 3 was devoted entirely to Verdi’s Requiem, his masterpiece that premiered in Milan in 1874. The full orchestra and featured soloists were joined on the crowded stage by a choir of 88 volunteer singers from near and far. , a flutist and 91����Ƶ music professor who is the festival’s executive director, said Verdi’s Requiem may have drawn the biggest crowd to Lehman Auditorium in the Bach Festival’s history.

The noon chamber concerts during the week, held at historic Asbury United Methodist Church, included child-prodigy flutist Emma Resmini, pianist Naoko Takao, old Broadway show tunes, Dixieland jazz, organist Marvin Mills, and the premiere performance of Gwyneth Walker’s The Peacemakers.

The festival concluded on Sunday morning, as always, with a worship service patterned after the services that Bach led for 27 years at St. Thomas Church. His duties as cantor and organist included the ambitious – almost unbelievable − task of composing a cantata every week that illustrated the gospel reading of the day. This also meant that Bach had to prepare copies of music by hand and rehearse the musicians.

The gospel reading at the Bach Festival this year was Luke 5: 1-11, where Jesus called fishermen to leave their nets and join him as disciples. The orchestra and vocal soloists performed a Bach cantata on the subject, and the homily was delivered by Isaac Villegas, pastor of Chapel Hill Mennonite Fellowship in North Carolina.

Then the tired musicians returned home.

How do classical musicians – especially the members of the orchestra − make a living?

Hartman is typical of the musician who earns graduate degrees in his instrument and then struggles to pay his bills through music. One of his professors helped him prepare for a big break − auditioning successfully for the Winston-Salem and Greensboro symphonies in North Carolina.

But playing in small-city orchestras is not usually enough. So Hartman initially gave violin and guitar lessons and sought gigs as a solo player or as part of an ensemble.

Like many other musicians, though, Hartman found a more stable career at age 40 when he obtained a college teaching position. Today he is the orchestra director at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania.

He plans to be back in 2014 for the Bach Festival, when – among other things – the festival welcomes Canadian soloist Daniel Lichti for an encore performance of Felix Mendelssohn’s Elijah.

The Shenandoah Valley Bach Festival, with Kenneth J. Nafziger as artistic director and conductor, continued its tradition of artistic excellence by offering unparalleled classical music concerts with the highest caliber of musicians. This year’s theme, “Bach and Some Admirers,” featured works that reflect other composers’ admiration for Bach.

Dr. Kenneth Nafziger directs the Bach Festival orchestra, chorus and soloists Thomas Jones and Sharla Nafziger in Johannes Brahms’ “Requiem” the evening of June 16.
Photo by Jim Bishop

The ability of music to both inspire and bring healing was exemplified in the appearance on campus of internationally-acclaimed Canadian pianist Janina Fialkowska. She first collaborated with the Bach Festival in 1999 and was diagosed with a cancerous tumor in her left arm in 2002.

Ms. Fialkowska returned to the Lehman Auditorium stage to play Chopin’s “Concerto No. 2 in F Minor for Piano and Orchestra” and “Concerto No. 1 in E Minor for Piano and Orchestra” during the second festival concert June 15. She received a rousing standing ovation for each concerto performance.

In addition to her concert performances, at the Thursday noon concert, June 14, at Asbury United Methodist Church in Harrisonburg.

The monumental Johannas Brahms’ “Requiem” was performed June 16 by the festival chorus and orchestra, with featured soloists Sharla Nafziger, soprano, and Thomas Jones, baritone. It was Ms. Nafziger’s fifth appearance as a guest artist and Jones’ third at the festival.

The opening concert Sunday afternoon, June 10, featured the Bach “Concerto for Two Violins” with soloists Joan Griffing and Susan Black, and music of South American composers Hietor Villa-Lobos and Astor Piazzolla and of Felix Mendelssohn.

Festival performers presented shorter works in well-attended daily noon concerts Monday through Saturday, June 11-15, at Asbury United Methodist Church in downtown Harrisonburg. On June 16, local young musicians were featured.

The festival concluded Sunday morning, June 17, with the Leipzig service, a re-creation of an 18th century worship service at St. Thomas Lutheran Church in Leipzig, Germany, where Bach was cantor and composed a cantata for each week’s service.

“For a brief period each year, Harrisonburg becomes Leipzig, Germany, and Lehman Auditorium is transformed into St. Thomas Lutheran Church,” Dr. Nafziger stated. Bach’s “Cantata No. 100” was the featured work, with Father James Massa, a priest of the Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn, N.Y., as homilist.

Some musicians return every year to participate in the Bach Festival; a few, like Harrisonburg native Mark Hartman, have participated every year since the festival began in 1992.

Hartman, who teaches violin, viola and music theory at Cental College in Pella, Iowa, looks forward to playing violin in the festival, noting: “The performers and the music come together and develop a personality under the direction of Ken (Nafziger).

Mark Hartman, now teaching in Iowa, and colleague Philip Stoltzfus, Northfield, Minn., rehearse the Bach “Orchestral Suite.” They return to Harrisonburg every year to play in the Bach Festival orchestra.
Photo by Jim Bishop

“The Bach Festival has become fine-tuned, with a different theme every year, but the basic purpose remains – an opportunity for musicians to perform and audiences to experience a week of great music,” Hartman said.

Suzanne K. (Sue) Cockley of Harrisonburg has sung in the festival chorus several years and read scripture at this year’s Leipzig service. She deemed it a “luxury to immerse myself in a full week of classical music – exhaustive but inspiring.”

“For 14 years I have returned to the Bach Festival for the great music, great performances and great camaraderie. It is one of the most meaningful constants in my life,” said Sandra Gerster of Baltimore, principal oboist in the festival orchestra.

“I come back every year because the trust, respect and integrity that Ken Nafziger brings to the Festival is unsurpassed. He cultivates a safe environment where we are encouraged to take artistic risks, to try to perform something in a new way, where the musical process is valued and where the performances are truly expressions of emotion, not plastic displays of static perfectionism,” she said.

“I return because my colleagues have become my family, and I am constantly inspired, awestruck, heartened and buoyed by them,” Gerster added.

Such sentiments were echoed by Mary Kay Adams, Bach Festival coordinator and principal flutist in the festival orchestra.

Ms. Adams said she relished the chance “to work closely with so many wonderful people who played a vital role in making the festival successful – the musicians, board members, community volunteers, 91����Ƶ staff, donors, families who house musicians and Ken Nafziger and Joan Griffing.

“This festival continues to exceed my expectations on both musical and personal levels each year,” Adams said. “I’ve played in the orchestra since the beginning, 15 years ago, and have a deep appreciation for the outstanding musical quality. And because of the friendships established with returning musicians through the years, we look forward to working together each summer and renewing those bonds.”

Next year’s Bach festival will be held June 8-15, 2008, on the theme, “Bach and String Things.” Information is available on-line at .