January 4, 2006 Contacts: Deb Faling: 269-337-7407

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Linda Van Dis: 269-337-7407

The Mystery of Bach’s Cello Suites

Angela East, cellist

Tuesday, January 17, 2006; 7:30 p.m.

First Congregational Church, 129 S Park Street, Kalamazoo

Tickets: $10 ($5 Students)

Children under 12 Free

FOR TICKETS AND INFORMATION:

(269) 337-7407

Join us for a magical evening celebrating the power and mystery of the Baroque cello. The Bach Festival is delighted to present Angela East, the dynamic and controversial English cellist from the theatrical Baroque ensemble Red Priest, performing the first three of J.S. Bach’s cello suites as you have rarely heard them before. In Angela East, rigorous musical scholarship combines with the lively flights of fancy which typify the Baroque period. The concert will take place in the beauty and acoustic splendor of the sanctuary of the First Congregational Church in downtown Kalamazoo.

This rare opportunity to hear some of Bach’s most inspired and ingenious instrumental writing takes place on Tuesday, January 17th, at 7:30 p.m. First Congregational Church is located at 219 S. Park Street, on the corner of Michigan Ave. The program contains some of the most widely recognized music in the world, making this a wonderful way to ring in the New Year with friends and family.

The evening will open with the Suite No. 1 in G major. As with all of the Suites, this piece consists of a prelude and five dance-like movements in wildly contrasting styles. The concert begins with the immediately recognizable G major prelude, which starts with a seed of simplicity and flowers at the end of the movement.

The concert continues with the Suite No. 2 in D minor, which is in many ways the opposite of the 1^st suite. From the dreamy prelude to the nervous energy of the final Gigue, in which the thing that the music seeks throughout the piece is finally found at the end. This Suite is unlike any of the others in its philosophical and abstract nature

The final work on the program is Suite No. 3 in C major. With arpeggiated passages running up and down the range of the cello this suite takes flight, giving the impression of swallows darting between the strings. The evening comes to a close with the final Gigue, which is surely the most rip-roaring dance from all the suites.

Angela East lives in London, England where she is a member of Red Priest, a baroque ensemble that performed in Kalamazoo in 2003. She studied cello at the Royal Academy of Music in London. East has performed all over the world, both with ensembles and as a soloist. In 1990 she founded her multi-instrumental ensemble, The Revolutionary Drawing Room.  This ensemble specialises in chamber music from the revolutionary years in Europe from the French Revolution in 1789 to 1848. This ensemble has The Revolutionary String Quartet as its core and the latter has made eight CDs of Boccherini and Donizetti String Quartets for CPO records, one of which was chosen by Stanley Sadie in Gramophone magazine  for ‘Critics Choice’. The ensemble has performed in a number of important international festivals such as those in Ottawa, Stuttgart and the Leeds International Schubert Festival.

Angela East will give a very short concert at the Ravenwood Coffee House on Tuesday, January 17, at 11:30 a.m. The Ravenwood Coffee House is at 773 W. Michigan Avenue on the corner of Academy Street.

 Tickets for this concert are $10.00, or $5.00 for students, and are available by calling (269) 337 – 7407. 
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2005-2006 Kalamazoo Bach Festival events are made possible by Arts Council of Greater Kalamazoo, Arts Fund of Kalamazoo County, Brenda Bennett Salon, Borgess Health Alliance, Burdick-Thorne Foundation, H.P. and Genevieve Connable Fund, Dorothy U. Dalton Foundation, Irving S. Gilmore Foundation, Kalamazoo College, Michigan Council for the Arts and Cultural Affairs, National Endowment for the Arts, Pfizer, Inc., Ullrey & Company, Harold and Grace Upjohn Foundation, and many individual supporters.