Bach Festivals & Cantata Series
Southbank Centre: Bach Weekend
Bach Weekend at Kings Place

Name:

Bach Weekend
Bach Weekend at Kings Place
Martin Feinstein's Bach Weekend

Location:

London, England, UK

Venues:

2007- 2015: Purcell Room at Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, London SE1 8XX
Since 2016: Kings Place - music-art-restaurants, 90 York Way, London, N1 9AG.

Years:

Since 2007 (Annual Festival)

Months:

March-April

Artistic Director:

Martin Feinstein

Ensembles:

Feinstein Ensemble
London Bach Singers

Website:

Southbank Centre (Official Website)
King's Place: Bach Weekend
King's Place: Bach Weekend 2018
The Feinstein Ensemble

2007: A weekend of concerts devoted to the works of J.S. Bach. On Saturday, Martin Feinstein introduces the Trio Sonatas and the Feinstein Ensemble play an evening of J.S. Bach’s Violin Concertos. On Sunday, violinist Monica Huggett performs and talks about J.S. Bach’s unaccompanied Violin Sonatas and there is a complete performance of The Musical Offering (BWV 1079).
2009: J.S. Bach's years as Court Conductor at Köthen (1717-1723) were a time of enormous productivity. Even though a great many works from this period are lost, what remains includes extraordinary riches. Bach Weekend 2009 is dedicated to exploring this wonderful repertoire, with a series of performances given by this country's leading Bach interpreters. Repertoire performed throughout the weekend includes J.S. Bach's Violin Concertos, his Two and Three part Keyboard Inventions and a performance of the six Brandenburg Concertos. Performers include violinists Simon Standage and Catherine Manson, Baroque cellist Alison McGillivray, Jonathan Manson on viola da gamba and the Feinstein Ensemble.

History & Mission:

2010: Martin Feinstein's enormously successful Bach Weekend returns to Southbank Centre with J.S. Bach in Leipzig: From Church to Coffeehouse, giving the visitor a unique opportunity to listen to J.S. Bach's great works of this period with a renewed understanding.
Whether you are a J.S. Bach fanatic or someone curious to escape the often rigid tradition of modern classical music concerts, the Bach 2010 weekend, with its informed scholarship, high quality of playing and relaxed coffee-house format, is sure to be for the visitor. In March 1729 J.S. Bach was appointed director of the famous Collegium Musicum concerts at Zimmermann's Coffeehouse.
Each week Bach Collegium Musicum, as it was immediately renamed, presented original works and arrangements by J.S. Bach himself alongside music by other outstanding composers of the day. The combination of this role with his position as Cantor and music director of St Thomas's was an extraordinary one, inspiring a rich stream of both sacred and secular masterpieces and throwing light on a remarkably different concert-going culture to the one that we know today.
musicianship... Feinstein is a graceful player and decisive conductor' (Gramophone).
2012: South Bank Bach Festival started on March 23, 2012, with a Purcell Room concert of concertos including the A minor triple, Brandenburg 4, C minor for oboe and violin and the double for two violins. Later in the evening, at 10pm, Martin and Robin played the amazing B minor sonata, also in the Purcell Room.
2014: Martin Feinstein’s acclaimed Bach Weekend returns to Southbank Centre with its
unique combination of informality and outstanding performances. This year’s festival focuses on J.S. Bach’s genius in creating transcendent examples in each musical form, most famously in his B Minor Mass (BWV 232), Art of Fugue and Well-Tempered Clavier.
2015: Martin Feinstein's Bach Weekend returns to Southbank Centre with an exploration of the concerto, juxtaposing J.S. Bach’s concerto output with the masterpieces of his main inspiration Antonio Vivaldi. The concerto influenced every area of J.S. Bach’s composition, from his virtuoso instrumental concerti to his Cantatas or 'Sunday Concertos', as J.S. Bach himself called them.

2016: The Bach Weekend has established itself as one of the highlights of London’s musical calendar and 2016'’s festival is the first in its exciting new home at Kings Place.
Bach Weekend 2016 will feature the great devotional works of J.S. Bach's Leipzig period juxtaposed with the secular instrumental masterpieces written when J.S. Bach was court composer at Köthen and enjoying the greatest compositional freedom of his career.

Recent Festivals:

2007
Mar 20-22, 2009
Mar 19-21, 2010
Mar 25-27, 2011
Mar 23-25, 2012
[No Festival?], 2013
Mar 14-16, 2014
Mar 13-15, 2015
Apr 1-3, 2016
Apr 7-9, 2017
Apr 13-15, 2018

Logo: