Community Calendar

Experience the serene beauty of Twilight in the Cathedral, a concert that evokes the tranquility of a sacred evening in the historic San Carlos Cathedral. This annual concert highlights Baroque music for strings and organ.

This program brings musical worlds together in one exhilarating evening. Festival favorites Fire & Grace—Edwin Huizinga and William Coulter—are joined by mandolin luminaries Mike Marshall, long celebrated for his Brazilian collaborations, and Caterina Lichtenberg. Experience Bach’s brilliance as it meets bluegrass drive and the rhythmic warmth of Brazil.

The Baroque & Classical Academy provides training from internationally acclaimed Bach Festival musicians and learning opportunities at the Carmel Bach Festival. BCA musicians have a full rehearsal schedule, including guided sessions with mentors, in preparation for the Baroque & Classical Academy Quartet Showcase Concert. Throughout July, BCA musicians learn how to curate programs, create socially conscious programs, develop audiences, build donor relationships, and more. Musicians attend educational workshops with Festival musician mentors, film composers, board members, and others to learn skills to help them succeed as professional classical musicians.

The quartet also enriches the traditional Carmel Bach Festival community by offering free public masterclasses and performing a Showcase Concert featuring a program curated by the BCA musicians with guidance from Festival mentors.

This concert features French composer Joseph Bodin de Boismortier’s cantatas inspired by the seasons, written around the same time as Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Scored for voice, obbligato instrument, and continuo, they explore music’s ability to depict the changing seasons and the natural world.

Bach Cantatas features two expressive works by J.S. Bach—Christ unser Herr zum Jordan kam, BWV 7, and Cantata BWV 187. Rich in theological depth and musical invention, these cantatas showcase Bach’s gift for illuminating text through vibrant choral writing and nuanced instrumental color.

Beethoven subtitled his Pastoral Symphony “Recollections of Country Life”. Each of its five movements depicts a countryside scene. The first movement conveys the calm joy of arriving in the countryside, with gentle, flowing melodies. The second evokes a babbling brook, while woodwinds mimic birdsong. In the third, people dance and celebrate with lively rhythms. The fourth depicts a sudden, dramatic thunderstorm, one of Beethoven’s earliest musical portrayals of nature’s power. The final movement offers a peaceful shepherd’s song and a sense of restored serenity. For fans of Disney, this piece will sound familiar, as it was featured in Fantasia (1940).

In a typical season, the Virginia Best Adams (VBA) quartet comes to Carmel in July to train with Festival artists, and explore ways to communicate Baroque repertoire more vividly. In a light-hearted atmosphere of discovery, the VBA Masterclass participants experience a wealth of vocal music and examine all aspects of style, technique, communication, language, performance skills, and artistry. The Masterclasses are held at the Carmel Presbyterian Church and are free and open to the public. At the end of each festival season, our VBA Fellows perform in a Showcase.

Counterpoint is a collaboration between pianist and composer Conrad Tao and choreographer and dancer Caleb Teicher

The duo explore the dichotomy of their different perspectives and artistic practices, expanding their individual expressive capacity through a collective experience. Harmonic, rhythmic, and theatrical counterpoint between the artists seeks to map out constellations linking their disparate traditions, driving the imagination and opening the heart. The stylistically diverse music of Counterpoint includes the Aria from Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Art Tatum’s demented stride piano, Arnold Schoenberg’s ironic take on the Viennese waltz, a delicate miniature from Tao and Teicher’s More Forever, and threading it all together, a work that bridges traditions, approaches, and styles—Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.

Favorite selections from the Festival are performed in this closing night concert that celebrates music, Carmel, the musicians of the Bach Festival, and the Festival’s loyal patrons. The program is a sampler of musician and audience favorites from throughout the two-week Festival. The concert is followed by a celebratory party on the Sunset Center Terrace toasting the conclusion of the 89th Season.

Best of the Fest is a special, not-to-be-missed party that commemorates and honors music, the enduring legacy of Johann Sebastian Bach, the tradition of the Carmel Bach Festival, and the beautiful and mystical setting of Carmel-by-the-Sea.

Conducted by Cristian Măcelaru

Vivian Fung: America the Beautiful? (Festival Commission & world premiere)

Pedro Emanuel Pereira: Clarinet Concerto (Carlos Ferreira, Clarinet) (Festival Commission & world premiere)

Philip Glass: Symphony No. 15 Lincoln (Zachary James, Baritone) (West Coast premiere)

6:30PM • PRE-CONCERT PICNIC + TALK: A free outdoor pre-concert experience featuring a brass sextet and a special welcome by Music Director Cristian Măcelaru. Bring takeout or some snacks from home. Table seating available.

The 64th season kicks off with Music Director Cristian Măcelaru leading the Festival Orchestra and audience in a powerful meditation on the distance between national ideals and lived reality.

Vivian Fung‘s America the Beautiful? (Festival Commission & world premiere) opens the season with a work responding to the U.S. National Anthem through the lens of her intersectional identity as a dual Canadian-American citizen with Chinese familial lineage. The piece confronts the tension between patriotic tradition and the deeply imperfect struggle to uphold democratic values for all.

Pedro Emanuel Pereira‘s Clarinet Concerto (Festival Commission, world premiere), featuring clarinetist Carlos Ferreira, blends Portuguese musical traditions with experimental timbres and performative innovation, reimagining virtuosity for the present moment.

The program concludes with Philip Glass‘s Symphony No. 15 Lincoln (West Coast premiere)—featuring GRAMMY® award winning baritone Zachary James—is a six-movement symphony incorporating Abraham Lincoln’s own words, including the Emancipation Proclamation and reflections on law, power, and ambition. The work resonates forcefully with the urgencies of today.