One month until we open the Festival with our first-ever collaboration with the @baroqueartistscu , and we could not be more excited!
Mark your calendars, tell your friends, and get ready for a week chock full of Baroque chills and thrills. As always, all events are free and open to the public.
It's coming - are you ready???
It's been a busy spring, and we are getting excited that the Fourth Five Cities Baroque Festival opens in 5 short weeks! We've got what may be the best Festival yet planned, complete with new collaborations, new events, new venues, and new artists. Starting next week, we'll be spotlighting some of the artists, music, and cultural movements you'll experience at our fourth annual offering.
We're thrilled to remind you that every event of the Five Cities Baroque Festival is completely free - we do not sell tickets, and we never will. We invite you to come soak in what promises to be a stunning week of music, culminating with two performances of Handel's monumental oratorio "Israel in Egypt" - a tour de force celebrating liberation and freedom. Our doors will open 30 minutes before each event, and no one will be turned away.
Mark your calendars, tell your friends, and get ready! We can't wait.
#classicalmusic
#orchestra
#chorus
#localmusic
#freeconcerts
Springfield! As we continue working behind the scenes on a huge Fourth Festival this summer, we are so pleased to share a bit of lighter fare with you in the meantime. We will be presenting a program of music for string quartet at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception--where we brought last summer's Festival to a triumphant end--on March 7, and we'd love to see you there. Doors open at 6:30 and, as always, we welcome you to walk right in. We hope to see you there!
Happy New Year! As 2026 gets underway, we could not be more excited to announce the Fourth Five Cities Baroque Festival.
Building on the success of our first three Festivals, we are daring to aim even higher this year to bring more stunning performances and educational opportunities to our local communities - all with our laser focus on accessibility. We are proud to announce our first-ever collaboration with @baroqueartistscu , our presentation of this year's Resident Artist, Charlotte Mattax Moersch, and our closing presentations of Handel's timeless--and timely--meditation on oppression, redemption, and freedom, "Israel in Egypt," with performances in both Springfield and Decatur.
We are even prouder to announce that all performances will continue to be free and open to the public, so that everyone can experience incredible art that we know will comfort the troubled and trouble the comfortable.
Please visit / for all the details. Our Festival event page can be found at /events/4133907943496668/, with more to come. It is going to be another incredible week of music, and we cannot wait to share it with you.
This year's artwork was created and donated by @therealrexparker in memory of Katherine DeMoss Brown, one of our original supporters and a true friend of our friends and the causes in which we believe most deeply.
We are so excited to share one more movement of @davidmmoore88 's arrangement of Bach's Cantata 140 - the famous middle chorale, transformed into a rollicking, swung showcase for a couple members of the @millikin_som 's jazz quintet.
We've got a few more videos for you before our end-of-year announcement of the Fourth @fivecitiesbaroque Festival! Stay tuned!
At @FiveCitiesBaroque , we are always looking for ways to innovate, build bridges to more people, and showcase the talents of our incredible musicians. With Juneteenth falling on Thursday of Festival Week this past year, we found a great way to do all three. Together with St. Peter's AME Church, we were proud to present our program "Jazz and the Baroque," transforming our core repertoire into a form pioneered by some trailblazing African American musicians over a century ago.
@davidmmoore88 took Bach's famous Cantata 140, "Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme," and remade it into an incredibly cool series of charts that he and the @millikin_som Faculty Jazz Quartet brought to life on June 19th, 2025. We were glad for the chance to partner with St. Peter's to reach into a corner of our community with many folks we hadn't yet met in our three years of bringing great performances of great music to our neighbors. We were so grateful for the warm welcome we received and the chance to spend an evening together discussing and enjoying some old music made new.
We've got more stunning content for you - this time coming from the first ever full-length feature recital by our incredible Young Artists. Night 3 of Festival Week this past year saw them step out in a big way, and we are so glad to share a snippet with you.
Featured here is this year's mezzo Young Artist, @emilywheelernyc , singing Francesca Caccini's "Lasciatemi qui solo," accompanied by our dynamic continuo team of Max Holman on harpsichord and @instidora_ on cello. Sit back and relax as they blow you away with some of the most gorgeous music you'll hear all week.
Hello folks! We hope you have been well and have had a great start to your Fall. While we have been quiet for a bit here, we have been hard at work behind the scenes, and we are so excited to share a few updates with you, as well as give you the first of many highlights from our Third Festival in June.
Our Founding Director, @natewidelitzmusic , has transitioned to a remote role but continues to lead us from afar! We have therefore brought on a couple of new folks to help manage the organization. Please give a warm welcome the new Assistant Director of the Foundation, @ljaboutlit , and our newest Board member, @sarahriskindmusic . We are thrilled that they have agreed to help move us into a stronger, more vibrant future.
We are also hard at work finalizing plans for our Fourth Festival, coming June 2026. Stay tuned for all the details to come!
Finally, we are so excited to share the first highlight from our Third Festival - a fabulous performance of Johann Jacob Quantz's Quartet in D Major, QV 4:8. Our amazing quintet - @amandalpond , @alex.malaimare , @itsmysharona , @amy.catron , and Charlotte Mattax Moersch - closed their concert "Sans Souci: Music from the Court of Frederick the Great" with this stunner, and we are so happy to finally be able to share it with you. More to come soon, but for now, it is so nice to be back with you all!
You won't want to miss a single concert in our exciting upcoming season, including the opening concert for next year's Five Cities Baroque Festival! Tickets for BACH events are available on our website now.
And with that, the Third Festival has come to a close.
One of our biggest concerns coming into this season centered around how we were possibly going to follow the monumental, star-studded St. John Passion that closed our Second Festival. Thanks to the amazing support of so many people and organizations in our community and further afield, we pulled it off - and then some. Our presentation of two seldom-heard masterpieces by Mozart and Marianna Martines capped off an incredible week of rehearsals, performances, and workshops, and we could not have asked for a more magnificent venue in which to do it. If you listen closely, you can probably still make out the faint echoes of that final C Major chord (was that a 6-second reverb, or 6 days?).
We are once again indebted to so many who enabled us, once again, to present an entire week of free, open, elite performances of some of the best music ever written to the community. There are far too many folks without whose support this could not have happened to name; a project like this truly takes a village. But to our supporters, our artists, our volunteers, our venues, and, for the first time, our staff - thank you from the bottom of our hearts.
Video highlights will be coming soon, followed by, we are so excited to say, the announcement of our Fourth Season. Stay tuned, but for now - thank you, thank you, thank you.
A quick look at the last 24 hours as we begin to bring the 2025 @fivecitiesbaroque Festival to a triumphant close. Our jazz quintet absolutely dazzled playing through a superb arrangement of Bach’s Cantata 140 by @davidmmoore88 to celebrate Juneteenth at St. Peter AME, our Festival Chorus and Orchestra and incredible soloists came together for the dress rehearsal of what promises to be a spectacular closing concert, and our Youth Academy students outdid themselves at their recital to wrap up their week learning from our professional artists.
We’ve got one final evening of music for you - Mozart & Martines at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Springfield. As always, it is free and open to the public. We hope to see you there!
Quick photo dump from Days 3-5 of this year's Festival! Incredible things happening all over Decatur mid-week: Our Young Artists gave a stellar recital on Tuesday night, our Artists in Residence, @filigreeensemble , blew everyone away with a refreshed look at the 24 Italian Art Songs on Wednesday, and our Youth Academy students gave an awesome lunchtime concert downtown at Anna Thai yesterday. Meanwhile, rehearsals have started for this weekend's big closing concert in Springfield.
Photos soon to come from last night's absolutely incredible reimagining of Bach's "Wachet auf" by our jazz quintet, and we bring the 2025 Festival to a close with the Youth Academy's culminating recital tonight and Mozart & Martines tomorrow night. There's still lots of incredible music to come - don't miss it!
