CANCELED: Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society

press release: We would love nothing more than present our 29th season to you live and in person this June as we planned. But, dear friends, a new way of life has intervened! Riches to Rags will be moved to 2021.

Never fear! We, at Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society have always been light on our feet, nimble in the face of challenge, flexible throughout changing fortunes and venues, and we have a few tricks up our sleeve. Stephanie and Jeffrey are already planning for new musical treats as soon as we are permitted. You can look forward to some creative collaborations we’re cooking up for August—if it’s safe to do so—and a special celebratory mini-season over the holidays in late December. We’ll get there together!

All of us in the arts community have been upended by postponements and cancellations, but BDDS will survive this tsunami because of the unending and generous support of so many of you. Stay home and stay well!

Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society (BDDS) presents its 29th annual summer chamber music festival, RICHES TO RAGS, June 7 – 28, 2020. This festival features eight concerts over four weekends, each weekend offers two different programs. The venues are intimate: the state-of-the-art Collins Recital Hall in the new Hamel Music Center on the UW-Madison campus, The Playhouse at Overture Center, and the jewel box historic Stoughton Opera House.

In a rousing four-weekend festival, you'll hear great classical masterpieces and the best of contemporary works. A roster of musicians with national and international reputations guarantees fantastic performances. Concerts are spiked with stories about the music, mystery guests, and even door prizes. It's chamber music with a bang! Artistic directors and performers Stephanie Jutt, flute, and Jeffrey Sykes, piano, are joined by 21 musicians and one visual artist. 

WEEK TWO

In “For Love and Money,” Russian accordion virtuoso Stas Venglevski joins Stephanie Jutt, flute, and the San Francisco Piano Trio in a program that features music written in the hope of making a quick buck.  The concert will feature Beethoven’s Serenade for flute and piano, op. 41and his virtuosic Piano Trio in G Major, op. 1, no. 2, a spectacular trio dedicated to one of Beethoven’s most generous patrons.  Stas Venglevski will perform a solo sonata by Vasily Zolotaryov, plus his own takes on Eastern European and Latin American tunes, many composed by Stas, arranged for accordion, flute, violin, cello, and piano.  Visual artist Lisa A. Frank will create an exquisite video installation behind the performers on stage in The Playhouse at Overture Center. 

“For Love and Money” will be performed in The Playhouse, Overture Center for the Arts,  Saturday, June 13, at 7:30 pm. The concert will be preceded by a Young Professionals Mixer.  To reserve: crownover@bachdancinganddynamite.org

“Fortune Favors the Bold,” will features the first of Beethoven’s many ventures in the stormy key of C minor: the Piano Trio in C minor, op. 1, no. 3. The program also includes the “Kakadu” Variations, op. 121a, a work that Beethoven tinkered with almost his entire adult life. Stephanie and Jeffrey will perform Dick Kattenburg’s no-holds-barred, jazz-inflected Sonata for flute and piano. The second half of the concert again features accordionist Stas Venglevski in bold works by Stas and composers from Eastern Europe.

“Fortune Favors the Bold” will be performed in The Playhouse, Overture Center for the Arts,  Sunday, June 14, at 2:30 pm. 

This season will be special for two reasons. First, the RICHES. Concert societies around the world will celebrate Ludwig van Beethoven’s 250th birthday by programming complete cycles of his most famous works: the piano sonatas, string quartets, and symphonies. BDDS is celebrating too, but with a twist: we are stretching our season by a week in order to perform all nine of Beethoven’s piano trios scattered across five programs. We’re pairing the trios with readings from Beethoven’s letters and diaries that give deep insight into his life. The trios, each of which is musically rich, were among Beethoven’s best-selling works during his lifetime. They span a greater portion of his composing career than his sonatas, quartets, or symphonies, ranging from his opus 1 (1795) to his opus 121a (1824). Despite this, they tend to be undervalued and underperformed today, and rarely do you hear all nine trios in close succession.

For the RAGS, we’re ending our festival with the great rags of Scott Joplin and his contemporaries performed by the New England Ragtime Ensemble (NERE).  The great composers of ragtime and early jazz, most of whom were African-American—Scott Joplin, James Scott, and Jelly Roll Morton, for example—never enjoyed even a fraction of the financial success of Beethoven, certainly not the level of success that their artistic achievements warranted. NERE will present two programs showcasing this monumental American musical achievement. Formed by Gunther Schuller in the early 1970s and reconstituted recently by one of its original members, flutist Stephanie Jutt, the ensemble is the leading ragtime chamber orchestra in the world.