WKCR-FM 89.9 CELEBRATES BACH WITH TEN-DAY FESTIVAL

This holiday season, WKCR-FM presents BachFest 2005: a round-the-clock ten-day celebration of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.  From 9:30 AM on 12/22/05 until 2:00 AM on 1/1/06, the radio station will broadcast Bach's choral, orchestral, chamber, and keyboard music in a wide variety of recordings.  The festival will feature interviews with leading Bach scholars and performers, as well as in-depth commentary by WKCR's announcers.

An annual tradition and a listener favorite for over twenty years, BachFest was named "Best Musical Thing about Christmas" by the New York Press in 2002.  This year, WKCR introduces a new format aimed to bring out an aspect of Bach that still fascinates performers and listeners alike. From the tiny keyboard miniatures to the mighty passions, every Bach composition serves as a window into a vast and varied creative process, the product of one man's ever-changing mind.  To explores how this creative process developed over nearly forty years, the new format consists of a chronology of one- to three-day segments, each exploring a different period in Bach's life.  The festival begins with Bach in his pre-Weimar period, a young man experimenting with cantatas and keyboard works.  Later, listeners can hear him in his 20s and 30s, settled as court organist and concert master at Weimar.  After following him from Weimar to Cöthen and then to Leipzig, the festival concludes with Bach in his Late Leipzig period, an aging man who struggled to hold a quill as he scribbled out the Goldberg Variations and Art of Fugue.

Throughout this new format, WKCR will still include segments familiar from years past: cantata request hours, a Glenn Gould festival-within-a-festival, and a "Jazz Meets Bach" segment hosted by resident jazz expert Phil Schaap.  We plan as well to feature interviews with pianist Angela Hewitt, violinist Rachel Podger, conductor Philippe Herreweghe and others.  It is our great pleasure to present BachFest 2005 to greater New York and beyond

WKCR-FM is the listener-supported, student-run radio station of Columbia University.  Broadcasting to greater New York at 89.9 FM and worldwide at www.wkcr.org, the station presents a spectrum of music and talk programming heard nowhere else on radio. 
The WKCR Classical Department supports this mission by offering an alternative to traditional classical radio.  We are committed to playing works in their entirety and to challenging the ear every day with new and varied programming, including contemporary art music and rare historic recordings. 

Contact: Jacob Stulberg and David Tam
Telephone: (212) 853-6634
E-Mail: classical@...