History of the Oregon Bach Festival

In 1970 German organist and conductor Helmuth Rilling came to Eugene, Oregon, for a series of workshops and an informal concert. Since then, the Oregon Bach Festival — because of the efforts of Rilling, co-founder Royce Saltzman and a veritable army of volunteers, musicians, audience members and donors — has blossomed into one of the foremost celebrations of Bach’s music and legacy in the United States.

That first collaboration between Rilling and Saltzman was modest, culminating in a concert of short choral and organ works. But in 1971, under the banner of the ‘Summer Festival of Music’, four concerts were added to the schedule, including a complete performance of Bach’s St. John Passion. Over the next few years, the Festival expanded to include performances of major choral-orchestral works, instrumental and chamber concerts, solo recitals, workshops, and master classes. As the decade closed, the event was renamed the Oregon Bach Festival, more clearly defining the Festival’s location and to honor the composer who inspired the founders.

As an outgrowth of the University of Oregon’s School of Music, the Festival’s original home was Beall Concert Hall on campus, still a much-loved setting for solo recitals and chamber music and one of the finest chamber recital rooms in North America. In 1982, the Hult Center for the Performing Arts was built in Eugene. With its 2,500-seat Silva Concert Hall and first-rate facilities, the Hult Center enabled the Festival to expand and attract international performers of the highest caliber.

Taking advantage of these new resources, the Festival celebrated Bach’s 300th birthday in 1985 in gala fashion. Performances included Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, St. John Passion, B Minor Mass, all six Brandenburg Concertos, and ten more masterworks by Bach. The season culminated with performances at the Hollywood Bowl at the invitation of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association.

Helmuth Rilling, John Evans, and Royce Saltzman in Stuttgart

Such internationally regarded artists as Arleen Auger, Sylvia McNair, Frederica von Stade, Ben Heppner, Thomas Quasthoff, Quartetto Gelato, the Shanghai Quartet, Sylvia McNair, Robert Levin, Bobby McFerrin, Jeffrey Kahane, Nicholas McGegan, Midori, and Sarah Chang have been introduced by the Festival to the community. Members of the Festival chorus and orchestra come from professional organizations throughout the United States, Canada and Europe, and return year after year.

While the great works of the past are a mainstay of the repertoire, the Festival is also committed to the bold and the new. In 2001, Helmuth Rilling won a Grammy Award for the Best Choral Performance of the year, for the Festival’s world premiere recording of Krzysztof Penderecki’s Credo. The Festival’s world premiere of Arvo Pärt’s Litany was the first American commission from the composer and a biennial composers symposium under the direction of the University of Oregon’s Robert Kyr now brings emerging composers to Eugene to study and have their music performed.

Education has always been the heartbeat of the Festival. The Master Class in Conducting (a key program from the very beginning) offers advanced training in choral and orchestral conducting. It has attracted students from Brazil, Canada, Chile, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Russia, Switzerland, Taiwan, and Venezuela. A more recent addition in the last decade, the Stangeland Family Youth Choral Academy, provides an intensive training and performing experience for high school singers from across the country, under the tutelage of inspiring conductor Anton Armstrong.

The Rilling format in Eugene, which combines master classes, lecture demonstrations and concerts, has become the model for the International Bachakademie Stuttgart that he founded in 1981, as well as for subsequent Bach academies in Eastern Europe, South America, and Asia.

The Festival’s catalog with Hänssler Records includes more than ten titles, and Festival concerts have reached worldwide audiences through syndication on more than 200 radio outlets coast-to-coast and beyond, through broadcasts on National Public Radio, American Public Radio, Voice of America and both the British and Canadian Broadcasting Corporations. Writers from The Times (London) and major papers from Germany and Spain have hailed the event. Critics from this nation’s major media, including the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Examiner and Washington Post have described the Festival variously as “remarkable,” “excellent,” and “astonishing.”

As Festival artistry has grown, so has funding from such public and private supporters as Wells Fargo Private Bank, Lufthansa, Pepsi-Cola, Mercedes Benz, KeyBank, the Oregon Arts Commission, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Paul Allen Foundation, and the Silva and the Nils and Jewel Hult Endowments of the Arts Foundation of Western Oregon through the Oregon Community Foundation.

Important individual contributions have come from thousands of citizens. In particular, the gifts of the Scharpf family and Bill Bowerman (UO track coach and cofounder of Nike) helped to perpetuate artistic funding in a critical time in the early 1980s.  Currently the $10 million Saltzman Endowment Campaign, launched in 2004, approaches its completion at the end of 2008.

For four decades, the masterworks of Bach have found enthusiastic and highly committed audiences in the Pacific Northwest through the Oregon Bach Festival. With the appointment last summer of the BBC’s John Evans as Executive Director — to succeed honored co-founder Royce Saltzman — the Festival looks ahead to a new and exciting episode in its long and distinguished history, embracing the challenge of taking its destiny — and Bach’s legacy — into the future.