Festival Concert Programs
The festival begins on a celebratory note, connecting Joseph Haydn, the father of the Classical style, with the Baroque era’s greatest master, Johann Sebastian Bach. Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, son of Johann Sebastian, composed his dashing A major Cello Concerto only three years after his father’s death, setting a new standard of instrumental brilliance. In Haydn’s dramatic cantata, the heroine Ariadne is abandoned during the night on the island of Naxos by her lover Theseus, whom she had saved from the Minotaur. Haydn’s ever popular C major Violin Concerto follows, and the evening closes with Johann Sebastian Bach’s secular cantata Be still, stop chattering (in essence, a short comic opera), which tells the humorous, cautionary tale of a young woman addicted to coffee.