22 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY JULY 9-15, 2026 www.montereycountynow.com “The musicians come from all over the world—many of them live in big cities, in Europe, in New York City,” Huizinga says. “When you bring them to a tiny little house way up on the cliffs of Big Sur, it’s otherworldly, very special and incredibly connected to the Earth.” Of his two decades with the festival, Huizinga adds, “You kind of become part of the landscape. It’s so important to me. I consider this area one of my homes.” The 89th Carmel Bach Festival opens Saturday, July 11, with all season passes sold out but individual tickets still available. Now in its third year under Lutz, the festival is bursting at the seams—two weeks of programming packed so tightly that expansion is already under discussion. (Hence the planning already well underway a year ahead of schedule for an event in Norman’s Big Sur home. Earlier this season, free preseason concerts took place in libraries in Monterey, Marina and Salinas.) Alongside the big concerts, the festival spreads into venues across Carmel, including the longtime anchor of Carmel Mission Basilica. New this season is Studio 105, an intimate space dubbed the Carmel Cabaret located on the first floor of the Sunset Center and suited to small theatrical productions and close-quarters performance. “It has a very different feeling,” Lutz says. It’s the setting for the program crafted by festival’s 2026 featured composer and curator Angélica Negrón, whose practice makes her a natural embodiment of the festival’s theme. The program she curates at Studio 105 is titled “Field of Sound,” taking place on Thursday, July 23. Negrón draws from the natural world directly—running sound through plants and vegetables, weaving field recordings into composition, but this is one way she approached music. Two of Negrón’s works, Lo infinito and Marejada, will be presented, the former as part of the Sunday candlelight series and the latter on Fridays at the Sunset Center. (Read more in a profile of Negrón on p. 24.) Another recommendation Lutz offers is for Sunday’s main concert at Sunset Center Theater (Sundays, July 12 and 19), Bach & Rebel, curated and directed by the festival’s artistic director, Grete Pederson. The program is striking in its architecture. It opens with a funeral march for Queen Mary, moves through a French ballet by Jean-Féry Rebel, and arrives at the program’s centerpiece, Nuits, adieux, by Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, who died in 2023. Then it settles into a Purcell hymn arrangement before closing with Bach’s “Cantata 214.” “We start with death and chaos,” Lutz says, “and then a kind of rebirth, coming back to Bach’s cantata.” It is, he says, characteristically Pederson: “What she does so well is place Bach within the context of the modern world.” That is what the festival has always insisted on—that Bach is not a historical artifact but a living presence, one that sounds different whether in a concert hall, in a centuries-old mission, on a stage where the audience sits among the players, or perhaps most vividly in a house on a cliff above the Pacific—by a fellow designer, a fellow master of intricate art, even if channeled through a different medium. The 89th Carmel Bach Festival runs Saturday, July 11-Sunday, July 26. Various times and venues. Free-$280. (831) 624-1521, bachfestival.org. Tickets for the Emile Norman Retreat in Big Sur on Tuesday, July 6, 2027 are available at tinyurl.com/Bach2027. “We start with death and chaos, and then a kind of rebirth.” While the 89th Carmel Bach Festival starts on Saturday, July 11, rehearsals and pre-festival concerts have been taking place for weeks now. Above: Grete Pedersen, at the podium during a rehearsal, has been the artistic director and principal conductor of the festival since 2022. MICHELLE MAGDALENA MADDOX MICHELLE MAGDALENA MADDOX
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