Pre-concert Showcase: 6:45 p.m.

Members of the baroque orchestra talk about and demonstrate their period instruments.

Johann Sebastian Bach assembled the monumental B minor Mass in the last years of his life, a compendium of some of his greatest works from across the length of his storied career. He viewed it as a summation of his life’s work in sacred music, and had it bound in a volume that would lay ignored for decades. Without question one of the greatest masterworks in all of Western Music, the variety of styles, rhetorical flourishes and magnificent orchestrations expand a simple Mass Text into a tour de force  baroque composition, never to be rivaled. To hear it with period instruments and a suitably small vocal ensemble is to hear it (unlike most modern performances) as Bach conceived it, an opportunity not to be missed.

Len Torrie, soprano (Montreal)

Myriam Leblanc, soprano (Montreal)

Nicholas Burns, alto (Vancouver)

Philippe Gagné, tenor (Montreal)

Sumner Thomson, bass (Boston)

William Kraushaar,  bass (Montreal)