Choir director, organist, and composer Richard Webster, who helmed Bach Week in Evanston for 50 seasons, will conduct new venture based at St. Vincent de Paul Church
Inaugural concert, set for March 21, 2025, to feature brass and choral music of J. S. Bach and Giovanni Gabrieli
New board members, donor pledges, and in-kind support from St. Vincent fuel rechristened organization
Robert Beatty, St. Vincent’s music director, is longtime friend and former protégé of Webster’s who performed at Bach Week in the early 1990s
CHICAGO, October 20, 2024 — The former Bach Week Festival in Evanston, Illinois, which concluded its half-century run in May, has spawned Bach in the City, with an inaugural concert scheduled for 7:30 p.m. March 21, 2025, at St. Vincent de Paul Church in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood, its home venue.
Choir director, organist, and composer Richard Webster, who helped launch Bach Week in 1974 and was its music director for the next 50 seasons, will serve in the same capacity with Bach in the City.
“Our entire organization is thrilled that St. Vincent has offered Bach in the City a home in the cultural heart of Lincoln Park, one of Chicago’s great destinations for the performing arts,” Webster says.
Webster’s artistic partner in the new venture is Robert Beatty, St. Vincent de Paul’s director of music and community development, who spearheaded the collaboration between the church and the new organization. He has also joined Bach in the City’s board.
The March debut concert, described as a pilot project to gauge audience and donor interest, will feature works for chorus and brass ensemble by German Baroque composer Johann Sebastian Bach and Italian Renaissance composer Giovanni Gabrieli. Performing are the Gaudette Brass quintet and the Bach in the City Chorus, comprising veteran choristers from Bach Week and newcomers chosen by audition. The concert date is J. S. Bach’s 329th birthday.
“St. Vincent de Paul’s splendid acoustics and spacious layout are perfectly suited to Gabrieli’s polychoral compositions,” Webster says.
Tickets will be available in January at bachinthecity.org.
The board of the tax-exempt nonprofit corporation behind Bach Week recently approved the name change to Bach in the City and elected new officers and board members. They also rescinded the previous decision to wind down operations. Some of the new members sang in the Bach Week Festival Chorus and were among the many festival fans who expressed dismay when it was announced that the spring 2024 50th anniversary season would be the last.
At the time, the festival board cited fundraising challenges, particularly the evaporation of institutional grants, and difficulties recruiting board members to share the workload as reasons for the festival taking its final bow.
To help Bach in the City get off the ground, St. Vincent de Paul is waiving hall rental fees for the near future. The church is also providing meeting and office space and housing the organization’s library and archives gratis.
Bach in the City has hired Ana Miranda-Gonzalez, the church’s communications director, on a freelance basis to manage its website, social media, email campaigns, donor communications, and box office operations.
“Bach by popular demand”
Webster says he was swarmed by concerned guests at the May 5 after-party, following Bach Week’s final concert, asking what they could do to keep the enterprise going.
“I felt a bit like the Jimmy Stewart character in the final scene of ‘It’s a Wonderful Life,’ when generous townspeople converged on his house to show their appreciation.”
He says he explained the situation and told them if they could round up enough devoted, like-minded volunteers to serve on the organization’s hands-on board and jump-start a fundraising effort, he’d see what he could do.
“Suddenly, we’ve been infused with a new life, new board members, new name, new venue, and new energy,” he says.
“Call it Bach by popular demand,” he says.
Bach Week Chorus members who stepped up to serve as first-time board members include Jennifer Greenwood of Arlington Heights, board secretary; Tunde Osilaja and Kerstin Wellbery of Chicago, among the earliest and staunchest advocates for preserving Bach Week; and Cindy Buettgen of Winnetka.
Other new board members include newly elected president Matt Glover of Chicago and Richard Gorman of Wilmette.
Board member and chorister Michael Coleman of Evanston, the festival’s longtime volunteer treasurer and finance chairman, has agreed to remain in the post until a successor is found.
An audience member who approached Webster after a Bach Week concert last spring about continuing the festival made “a significant pledge of financial support” and has offered to help with fundraising, according to Webster.
Embraced by St. Vincent de Paul
“I was both surprised and overwhelmed by the show of concern and offers of support,” Webster says. “But what sealed the deal was Bob Beatty’s enthusiastic welcome and pledge that St. Vincent’s would heartily embrace us into their church as our new home.”
At St. Vincent, the idea of hosting Bach in the City “was warmly welcomed across the board,” Beatty says. “Everybody understands the value that such an organization brings to our music ministry and our mission to enrich the spiritual life of the broader community.”
Webster and Beatty are longtime friends and colleagues. In 1992 and 1993, Beatty was Webster’s assistant organist and choirmaster at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Evanston, the Bach Week Festival’s first home. Beatty performed organ works of J. S. Bach at the festival and helped stage manage concerts.
“Anybody who’s ever worked under Richard knows that the end result has to be perfection,” Beatty says. “That’s just the way it is.
“But Richard is also a friend. He’s a warm, genuine, caring person who is very personable and nurturing.”
Webster praises St. Vincent for its visual aesthetics, acoustics, and spaciousness. “It’s an amazing sacred space,” he says. “It’s hard to find something quite like it in metropolitan Chicago.”
Webster says he’s confident many of Bach Week’s stalwart patrons from Evanston and elsewhere in the northern suburbs will attend Bach in the City concerts at St. Vincent.
The church has hosted the Chicago Chorale, Bella Voce, and Robert Ferris Chorale, among other professional-level ensembles. Grammy-winning conductor John Nelson’s Chicago Bach Project drew capacity crowds for its high-profile productions of J.S. Bach’s large-scale sacred masterworks.
“For now, we’re starting out with modest ambitions and looking to build a sustainable model for the organization,” Webster says. “But who knows? Someday we might find ourselves with a festival.”
Webster, who splits his time between residences in Chicago and Boston, is a lecturer on the faculty of Yale University’s Institute of Sacred Music. He recently completed his tenure as interim director of music at St. Paul’s Choir School and Parish, Cambridge, Massachusetts, having retired in 2022 as director of music and organist at historic Trinity Church on Boston’s Copley Square. Webster is organist and choirmaster emeritus at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Evanston, where he served from 1974 to 2003.
Bach in the Subways
Bach in the City will continue the Bach Week Festival’s participation in the annual, international Bach in the Subways movement featuring free daytime public performances of Bach’s music in locations where a broad swath of the public can experience it.
For the past two years, Bach Week Festival instrumentalists and choristers, led by Webster, have given pop-up performances around midday in the Grand Hall of Chicago’s Union Station.
The location and time of Bach in the City’s March 21, 2025, Bach in the Subways performance will be announced at a later date. The Gaudete Brass will be among the artists.
