Upcoming Concerts:

The Oregon Bach Collegium 2024-2025 Season

‘And Musick Shall Untune the Skye’

A Violin and Harpsichord Recital

Sunday, November 24, 2024 3pm

Episcopal Church of the Resurrection, 3925 Hilyard, Eugene

Dr. Joyce Chen and Emma Simmons invite you to a violin and harpsichord recital exploring a selection of iconic and virtuosic baroque sonatas. Spanning a century of European styles and technical developments, this program features 17th- and 18th- century sonatas of Marco Uccellini, Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber, Arcangelo Corelli, J.S. Bach, and Jean-Marie Leclair. Combining their fiery Aries spirits, this duo is excited to share their collective experience: Dr. Chen’s international performance and academic prowess with Simmons’s Oregon roots and burgeoning early music career. This program will be repeated as part of the University of Oregon faculty recital series at 7:30pm on Tuesday, November 26th in Berwick Hall.

OBC presents most concerts free-of-charge in order to make early music accessible to the widest possible audience. If you like what we do, and want to support our efforts to maintain and grow OBC, please consider donating. We welcome cash, checks or credit cards at the door or PayPal on line.

Cello Sonatas of Antonio Vivaldi

Sunday, January 19, 2025 3pm

Episcopal Church of the Resurrection, 3925 Hilyard, Eugene

Vivaldi fully embraced the cello as a solo instrument, adding significantly to its nascent Italian repertoire. In addition to his 28 cello concertos, Vivaldi wrote nine sonatas for cello and basso continuo, which beautifully showcase the instrument in its sonorous low register and singing tenor range. Baroque cellists Jeffrey Ericson Allen and Sophie Phillips-Meadow have selected four of their favorites to share in concert, joined by harpsichordist Susanne Giordano. Each sonata is introduced with a reflective slow prelude, followed by alternating fast and slow movements, often following dance forms. A wide range of expressive territory is covered: regal, energetic, playful, expansive, melancholic and pastoral affects are all sounded with Vivaldi’s signature ingenuity and vitality. Renowned musicologist Michael Talbot called these sonatas “the best instrumental chamber works produced by Vivaldi.”

Past Concerts

2024-2025 Season

A Baroque Ball

Listen, Dance, and be Merry!

Sunday, November 10, 2024 3pm

Oregon Wine Lab, 488 Lincoln St., Eugene

The dance suite was an essential form of music during the Baroque. Nowadays, the suite is performed almost exclusively as abstract music, removed from its original context as dance music in the court or ballroom. Yet understanding how these dances were performed can inform our approach to the music, as well as give new appreciation for the ways composer innovated and played with different forms. Join us at the Oregon Wine Lab for a casual presentation of some of these dances from the 17th century. There will be a brief introduction to the steps of each dance. Audience members are invited to join in the dancing, or to simply sit back and enjoy the performance.

The concert itself is free of charge, but there is a one drink minimum purchase. Non-alcoholic options are available, as well as food.

From Telemann to Haydn:

String Trios of the 18th Century

Sunday, October 20th, 2024 3pm

Episcopal Church of the Resurrection, 3925 Hilyard, Eugene

Trio sonatas for the combination of violin, viola da gamba, and ‘cello are found from the early 17th century to the very end of the 18th, yet they remain relatively rare in the entire literature. Join us as we explore the various ways that composers of the 18th century employed this trio of instruments, exploring diverse textures and styles, from the high baroque of Telemann to the classical era of Haydn.

Bach to Our Roots:

Celebrating a New Season

Sunday, September 8th, 2024 3pm

Episcopal Church of the Resurrection, 3925 Hilyard, Eugene

Margret Gries and friends present the opening program of the 2024-25 season of the Oregon Bach Collegium. Featuring works by J.S. Bach, including his Orchestral Suite in D major, vocal works, and the Brandenburg Concerto no. 5. In addition to inaugurating our 16th season, this program will also be a celebration of Margret’s retirement from her formal duties as OBC program director. Please join us as we celebrate the transition of the Seasons.

2023-2024 Season

The Concert of Fower:

Dances of Court and Country

Sunday April 28, 2024, 3pm

Our next OBC program will focus on early English dance music. This repertoire was so popular that Playford’s English Dancing Master, a collection dance instructions remained in print for over one-hundred years. Our Baroque violinist Hannah LaGassey and viola da gambist Roma Sprung will be joined by Justus Mackintosh (cello, lute) and James Bishop (lute, guitar). This lively program for broken consort features selections from the Cambridge Consort books (c. 1590) as well favorites by Locke, Holborne and Tobias Hume. Thomas Morley describes this early English popular repertoire in his First Book of Consort Lessons (1599): “the songs are not many, lest too great plenty should breed a scarceness of liking. They be not all of one, because people’s fancies seek after a variety.” Finally he concludes with a clear statement of his music’s purpose: “in hope to procure your pleasure and recreation, your honorable acceptance shall be a sufficient warrant that our time is well spent.”

Episcopal Church of the Resurrection, 3925 Hilyard, Eugene

All in a Garden Green: Music from 17th century England

September 10, 2023, 2pm

September’s “Music to Die For,” at the Eugene Masonic Cemetery, features ballad tunes in arrangements for voice, baroque violin, recorder, viola da gamba and lute. From familiar songs like Greensleeves to the lesser-known but comically delightful “Go from my window,” this program presents tunes that were commonly heard in both court and country in seventeenth-century England. Well-known composers Dowland and Purcell are represented here, but we also celebrate the contributions of Hume, Bartlett, Mell and the great “anonymous.” Our delightful soprano soloist Naomi Castro is featured in songs about musical instruments (“Strike the Viol”), songs about nature (All in a Garden Green”), songs about love lost (“The Country Lass”) and love desired (“John, come kiss me now”).

Eugene Masonic Cemetery, the oldest chartered cemetery in Eugene, Oregon,
University St & E 25th Ave, Eugene, OR 97405

L’Ospedale della Pietà: Teaching a Legacy

November 19, 2023, 3pm

Join us at the Episcopal Church of the Resurrection in South Eugene to celebrate over a century of teachers and students of the Ospedale della Pietà in Venice. Our program, led by violinist Emma Simmons, features solo sonatas and chamber works of Rosenmüller, Vandini, Anna Bon, and Vivaldi, spanning several generations of pedagogy shifts. Rosenmüller, Vandini, and Vivaldi each had tenures of varying length at the Ospedale della Pietà between 1678 and 1749, and display three types of the archetypal music master. The Ospedale della Pietà was created as a convent and orphanage in the fourteenth century, and by the time of our program was a thriving music school for orphaned girls, raised there often from infancy. Anna Bon, however, was an exception, having been admitted to the school at the age of four specifically for a musical education. The program will feature harpsichord, baroque violin, viola da gamba, baroque cello and singer soloist Naomi Castro.

Episcopal Church of the Resurrection, 3925 Hilyard Street, Eugene

18th Century Keyboard Trios

Sunday, February 18, 2024, 3pm

The Oregon Bach Collegium presents the Collier Trio (violinist Emma Simmons, cellist Titus Young and pianist Tung Nguyen) in a unique program of eighteenth century keyboard trios, performed side by side on the fortepiano and modern piano. Featuring works of Joseph Haydn, Ignaz Pleyel, and a young Ludwig van Beethoven, this concert explores the changing landscape of keyboard repertoire as the struck, more dynamic clavier models overtook plucked harpsichord throughout western Europe. In the late 1700s, composers (and their publishers) knew that keyboard music was being enjoyed on a variety of instruments, but also of the different expressive possibilities each variety possessed. This abundance in experiments of expression is the musical petri dish from which we create our program: two Haydn keyboard trios, one from his 30s and the second his 60s, a work of Haydn’s student and future piano manufacturer, Ignaz Pleyel, and Beethoven’s C minor trio from his first Opus, which had been heavily criticized by his teacher…Haydn.

United Lutheran Church, 22nd and Washington, Eugene

‘Il Genio Inglese’:

Music of the Early English Baroque

Sunday, March 17, 2024 3 pm

When the Italian violin virtuoso Nicola Matteis arrived in London in the 1670s, he found there an eccentric national musical idiom that he dubbed ‘il genio Inglese’ (the English genius). Beginning in the 1620s, a new style of music began to emerge in the Court of King Charles I. Protestant England being ever-wary of Catholic influences – especially those from Italy – English composers began to develop this burgeoning style of music, perhaps as a way of setting themselves apart from their continental counterparts. However, with the ascendancy to the throne of King Charles II, and his propensity for continental forms of music, a flood of foreign influences entered the musical culture of England. Join us as we explore this uniquely-English Baroque style and its evolution over time – from the esoteric Fantasia-suites of William Lawes and Mathew Locke, to the transparent Italian sensibilities of Matteis, and the marriage of the two styles in the Sonatas of Henry Purcell.

Church of the Resurrection
3925 Hilyard, Eugene
(Despite construction on Hilyard, the road to the church entrance will be open.)

This season we have revised our ticket policy, changing from fixed admission fees to a choice of suggested “pay as you are able” options ($20, $15, $10, $5). By making this change we hope to make our programs available to more early music lovers in the community. We welcome cash, checks or credit cards at the door or PayPal on line.

2022-2023 Season

Music at the Court of Modena in the Seventeenth Century

October 9, 2022, 3pm

4. Mar 29

Join us as we travel to the Este court in 17th-century Modena and immerse ourselves in the instrumental music of Marco Uccellini and his contemporaries. Featuring sinfonias, dances and early sonatas published between 1639 and 1690, our musicians explore the expressive power of the unique instrumental style found in and around the court in Modena.