18 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY JULY 10-16, 2025 www.montereycountynow.com As one festival continues its historic run, another gathering of musicians makes its debut in hopes of creating a new tradition for Monterey County. The Carmel Bach Festival returns for its 88th season, while at the same time, the Future is Now jazz festival kicks off for the first time. Both promise to be a dazzling display of artistic achievement, paying homage to the work from the masters of their eras. The 2025 Carmel Bach Festival season, which runs July 12-26, is themed “Dialogues,” intending to spark conversations between the artists and the audiences, as well as the works themselves. For the Future is Now festival, taking place at venues across Monterey County from July 10-13, young jazz musicians across the state and Monterey County will get their shot to impress audiences as they grow their careers. Read on for a look into the past, present and future. —Erik Chalhoub, associate editor Period pieces, timeless influences 18 Bach Festival highlights 20 Familiar faces, new sounds 22 A bright future for jazz 24 For the last nine decades, the Carmel Bach Festival has been presenting timeless music by the biggest star of the Baroque era—Johann Sebastian Bach. But even though Bach, with more than a thousand pieces written, was a peculiarly prolific composer, his presence in the festival’s program has always been supported by other big names, from the other composers of the German Baroque period to the biggest stars of the Classical and Romantic era and, more often in recent years, present-day pieces. Regarding Bach, it is fair to say that his central work to be showcased at the 2025 festival is Mass in B minor, proclaimed by critics as the perfect achievement in Bach’s religious oeuvre. Other, equally legendary festival highlights are Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Requiem in D minor, also known as Requiem Mass, and Felix Mendelssohn’s Overture for the Midsummer Night's Dream opera. They are certainly not the only compositions worth the audience’s attention this year, but they all come with a great story. One could even argue that, written within a span of less than a hundred years, they are part of the same story. It takes about 10 hours by car to travel from Vienna to Dusseldorf and about 10 hours to get from Hamburg to Salzburg. These cities mark east and west and north and south of the world that gave us Bach, Mozart and Mendelssohn, just to start the list. At the time Bach (1685-1750), Mozart (17561791) and Mendelssohn (1809-1847) lived and composed, the German-speaking lands did not belong to any nation; nationalism did not become a default ideology until later in the 19th century. Germany would not be united until 1871, and Austria would not show up on the map as such until 1918, after World War I ended. The Carmel Bach Festival pays homage to three historic compositions crafted during a time of political and personal upheaval. By Agata Popęda Century of Influence Right: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s obsession with Bach’s use of the fugue is on full display with his Requiem. Opposite page: Johann Sebastian Bach’s influence spread beyond the Baroque period, inspiring bigname composers of later eras. OLGAINKS/SHUTTERSTOCK.COM
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