World-renowned pianist Richard Goode will join the Bach Virtuosi Festival in recital on Friday, June 23, 2023, in what promises to be one of the major musical events of the season. His program will include Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, one of Beethoven’s greatest works and will take place at St. Luke’s Cathedral in Portland with its marvelous acoustics. […]
Concert review: Tradition comes out on top in dueling Bach festivals
Returning musicians from the original event give Bach Virtuosi Festival the edge over Portland Bach Experience The battle of the Bach festivals in Portland entered its second round Sunday evening, when Lewis Kaplan raised the curtain on his Bach Virtuosi Festival, just hours after Emily Isaacson’s Portland Bach Experience concluded its run. Kaplan had started […]
Video Highlights from the past two years
2023 will be our greatest festival since beginning seven years ago! In addition to our Bach concerts and our array of great performers, world-renowned pianist Richard Goode will perform one of Beethoven’s greatest works, the Diabelli Variations. BVF will present two first-time performances at the festival, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and Brandenburg Concerto No. 1. In association with the Portland Museum of Art, we will […]
Interview on Spectrum TV
Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s involvement in Brotherhood/Sisterhood, the opening night production of the 2020 Bach Virtuosi Festival, was featured on NY-1 Spectrum TV. More than 825,000 people watch NY-1 each week and their stories are repeated multiple times per day. Below is the video. We story of Brotherhood/Sisterhood is about the larger role that classical music […]
Concert Review: Bach Virtuosi Festival begins with inspiring program
The concert Sunday at St. Luke’s was the first event of several in Portland this week. The seventh annual Bach Virtuosi Festival started on a high note – many of them, in fact, during its first event, a 90-minute concert Sunday at St. Luke’s Cathedral. The festival, which this year offers events, musical and otherwise, at various […]
Bach Virtuosi Festival adds a free concert to its weeklong series
The festival, founded by Lewis Kaplan in 2016, is bringing acclaimed classical musicians to Portland for six concerts. Lewis Kaplan stepped down from the Bowdoin International Music Festival in 2014 after serving for 50 years as artistic director of the event he founded. He was 80 at the time and could easily have let that […]
Full Concert Recording Sunday August 1, 2021
Brotherhood/Sisterhood Performance
August 16, 2020 on YouTube Brotherhood/Sisterhood was a performance about humanity, equity and social justice. The premise of this dramatic work was about the challenges we face today on the struggle for inclusion and acceptance. Select readings and speeches from renowned authors, poets and politicians read by distinguished actors, essayists, poets and politicians. The music […]
Masterclass August 23, 2020
Lewis Kaplan, Director of the Bach Virtuosi Festival, leads a Masterclass and then performs Bach’s Chaconne from Partita No. 2 in D Minor for Solo Violin, BWV 1004, to wrap up the 2020 concert series. This free, prerecorded event was recorded at the Bowdoin International Music Festival. Mr. Kaplan has refered to this piece as […]
Full Concert August 19, 2020
This concert offers four special performances from flutist Emi Ferguson, harpsichordist Arthur Haas, cellist Beiliang Zhu, and violinist Renee Jolles. The sound on each performance is striking and bold. We have put a great deal of time into making sure that the Virtual Virtuosi presentations rival that of the in-person concerts. Goldberg Variation No.13, arr. […]
Full Concert August, 18, 2020
Three performances from the world renowned Bach Virtuosi. This program opens with Ariadne Daskalakis joining us from Cologne, Germany. She is followed by a trio consisting of soprano Sherezade Panthaki, harpsichordist Arthur Haas, and Martha McGaughey on viola da gamba. We wrap up the evening with a “highly unusual location” for cellist Paul Dwyer to […]
Six Movements from Four Concerts
Six Movements from Four Concerts at the 2019 Festival.
BVF Associates Concert 2019
Before Bach and Beyond June 2019
Composers who influenced Bach and composers who were influenced by Bach.
Concert review: Bach’s breadth, secular and sacred, on display at Maine festival’s opening program
A top-flight ensemble of Baroque music specialists demonstrates their ample strengths. It’s tempting to think of June as Bach season in Maine, thanks largely to a pair of festivals: the Bach Virtuosi Festival, which got underway Sunday evening at the Cathedral of St. Luke’s, and runs through Sunday, and the Portland Bach Experience, which runs […]