George Hunka

Notes and comment

Author: George Hunka

  • J. C. Bach, Mozart, Schubert

    The Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, in rehearsal.

    My dance card for September seems to be rapidly filling up. On September 25 and 26, the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia opens its 2026-2027 season with Mozart 40, a triple bill of music spanning the half century or so between the late Baroque and middle Classical periods, a span quite appealing to my own musical affections. David Hayes will lead the orchestra in Mozart’s 1788 Symphony No. 40 in G minor, which Charles Rosen called “a work of passion, violence, and grief” in The Classical Style; Hayes will follow this with Johann Christian Bach’s 1760-or-so Symphony in G minor, Op. 6 No. 6, “arguably the darkest and most dramatic he composed,” said Tom Service in the Guardian in 2014; and the program will close with Schubert’s Symphony No. 5 in B-flat major, D. 485 of 1816, a conscious tribute to Mozart. “O Mozart! Immortal Mozart! what countless impressions of a brighter, better life hast thou stamped upon our souls!” went the slightly (though understandably) over-the-top appreciation Schubert wrote in his diary that year. Tickets are available now at this link.

    The rest of the Chamber Orchestra’s season looks similarly enticing, with a holiday presentation of three Brandenburg Concertos and an all-Haydn evening of his early symphonies on the schedule. More about the season here. A series of intriguing discussions about Bach and Beethoven accompanies this year’s concerts.

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  • Free Bach in Philadelphia

    St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Philadelphia.

    It looks like I got here just in time: Now in its second year, the Philadelphia Bach Collective is an ensemble offering free performances of Bach cantatas at the St. Mark’s Church in Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square, and it’s just announced its 2026-2027 lineup. The first concert of the year, on Tuesday, September 22, at 1:00 pm, pairs Bach’s Jesu, der du meine Seele: BWV 78 with Telemann’s Concerto for flute and strings, TWV 51:G2. I’ll certainly be there, but I’ll especially be there in March, when the Collective joins with the New York vocal outfit TENET Vocal Artists for a rare Philadelphia performance of Bach’s St. John’s Passion. Spikier and darker than St. Matthew’s Passion, St. John’s Passion comes close to broody opera, and I suppose Bach has me there; I have fond memories of hearing it earlier this year in Vienna. I’ll very much look forward to revisiting this, one of the great masterpieces of the Baroque and, as such, one of the great masterpieces period.

    The Philadelphia Bach Collective is the brainchild of co-artistic directors Steven Zohn, Heather Miller Lardin, and Rebecca Myers, who put together the organization to “[make] the music of Johann Sebastian Bach accessible and relevant for audiences across Philadelphia … [and] offer regular opportunities to hear Bach’s cantatas in an accessible, informal setting.” Free weekday concerts of Bach? Sounds suspiciously European to me. And not only to me; the Philadelphia Inquirer‘s Peter Dobrin wrote last year that the Collective’s concerts are “the kind of thing that, had you experienced it in Paris or Berlin, would make you say you wished we had that back home.” WRTI’s Meg Bragle called it “a gathering of friends and an invitation to the community” in this profile of the group.

    More information about the Philadelphia Bach Collective is here, and tickets are already available for the March St. John’s Passion. I won’t miss it.

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  • Opernabend: Manon Lescaut

    Jules Massenet and Daniel Auber had already written operas based on Histoire du Chevalier des Grieux, et de Manon Lescaut, a 1731 novel by Abbé Prévost, and when Puccini was reminded of this while composing his own opera in the early 1890s, he had a rejoinder ready: “Manon is a heroine I believe in and therefore she cannot fail to win the hearts of the public,” he said. “Why shouldn’t there be two operas about Manon? A woman like Manon can have more than one lover.” Puccini appears to be unaware of the Auber opera. He went on to add, “Massenet feels it as a Frenchman, with powder and minuets. I shall feel it as an Italian, with a desperate passion.”

    The Italian Riccardo Muti brings the same desperate passion to his own 1998 recording of Manon Lescaut for Deutsche Grammophon, which you can hear on radio klassik Stephansdom’s Opernabend tomorrow, Saturday, August 22, at 2:00 pm Eastern time; Muti leads a La Scala production with Maria Guleghina in the title role, surely enough of a recommendation. “Muti conducts with great passion and much finely calculated rubato, but the recording is a touch coarse in tuttis; bringing the voices forward into a studio rather than a theatre perspective has brightened the chorus, who overwhelm the orchestra in the Act 3 roll-call,” writes Gramophone. You can stream it at the rkS web site here. (And stay tuned afterwards for music by Heinrich Schütz, Robert Schumann, and more.)

    For a taste of Muti’s Manon, watch the below video of the conductor rehearsing the opera’s intermezzo with an unidentified orchestra on YouTube.

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