The schedule for the 45th annual Oregon Bach Festival was announced recently at the Friends of the Festival annual meeting at the UO’s Jaqua Academic Center. The 2014 OBF will run from June 26 through July 13 in Eugene, Portland, Corvallis, Florence and Newport.

The first festival under artistic director Matthew Halls will include a new emphasis on historically informed performance. Tickets for the festival will go on sale in February 2014.

Halls, who succeeded Helmuth Rilling as artistic director on July 15, launches his inaugural season with Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610. He will also direct the world premiere of his own reconstruction of Bach’s lost “St. Mark Passion,” completed in collaboration with Zurich-based scholar and organist Dominik Sackmann.

As part of the festival’s BachFest PDX series, the Monteverdi concert will be presented in Eugene on Thursday, June 26, and in Portland on Friday, June 27; and the St. Mark concert will be presented in Eugene and Portland on Tuesday, July 1, and Wednesday, July 2, respectively. Both will be performed in period-performance style, a theme that runs through the festival’s first week.

In Eugene, Halls will conduct Bach’s “Easter Oratorio” and an Easter cantata, as part of the Discovery series of lecture-concerts, on Monday, June, 30; Rachmaninoff’s “Vespers,” in the form of a candlelight vigil, on Thursday, July 10; and in the festival finale, Verdi’s “Requiem,” on Sunday, July 13.

With nine concerts set for the BachFest PDX Portland series, 34 main-event ticketed concerts and an anticipated schedule of more than 60 total events, including talks, exhibitions and free concerts, the 2014 OBF will be the organization’s most ambitious.

Visit the Oregon Bach Festival website to preview the 2014 festival.

- from the Oregon Bach Festival