History of the Oregon Bach Festival

Beall Hall, 1982

In 1970 German organist and conductor Helmuth Rilling came to Eugene, Oregon, for a series of workshops and an informal concert. Since then the Oregon Bach Festival — because of the efforts of Rilling, co-founder Royce Saltzman, and a veritable army of volunteers, musicians, audience members, and donors — has blossomed into one of the foremost celebrations of Bach’s music and legacy in the United States.

That first collaboration between Rilling and Saltzman was modest, culminating in a concert of short choral and organ works. But in 1971, under the banner of the “Summer Festival of Music,” four concerts were added to the schedule, including a complete performance of Bach’s St. John Passion. Over the next few years, the Festival expanded to include performances of major choral-orchestral works, instrumental and chamber concerts, solo recitals, workshops, and master classes. As the decade closed, the event was renamed the Oregon Bach Festival, more clearly defining the Festival’s location and honoring the composer who inspired the founders.

As an outgrowth of the University of Oregon’s School of Music, the Festival’s original home was Beall Concert Hall on campus, still a much-loved setting for solo recitals and chamber music and one of the finest chamber recital rooms in North America. In 1982 the Hult Center for the Performing Arts was built in Eugene. With its 2,500-seat Silva Concert Hall and first-rate facilities, the Hult Center enabled the Festival to expand and attract international performers of the highest caliber.

Taking advantage of these new resources, the Festival celebrated Bach’s 300th birthday in 1985 in gala fashion. Performances included Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, St. John Passion, B Minor Mass, all six Brandenburg Concertos, and ten more masterworks by Bach. The season culminated with performances at the Hollywood Bowl at the invitation of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association.

Helmuth Rilling, John Evans, and Royce Saltzman in Stuttgart.

The Festival’s concentration of major choral-orchestral works, its many educational programs, and the prevailing family atmosphere each season ha attracted an annual audience of 35,000. For four decades, visitors from every state and dozens of foreign countries have been welcomed to the Festival’s beautiful natural (and cultural) setting in the Pacific Northwest.

In 2008, under the leadership of new Executive Director John Evans, the Festival expanded its geographic reach to Portland and began a new approach to programming, with artist residences, partnerships, and co-production (with the School of Music and Dance) of the University of Oregon’s ChamberMusic@Beall series.

Such internationally regarded artists as Arleen Auger, Sylvia McNair, Frederica von Stade, Ben Heppner, Thomas Quasthoff, Quartetto Gelato, the Shanghai Quartet, Robert Levin, Bobby McFerrin, the 5 Browns, Jeffrey Kahane, Nicholas McGegan, Midori, Sarah Chang, and Savion Glover have been introduced by the Festival to the community. Members of the Festival chorus and orchestra come from professional organizations throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe and return year after year.

The 2009 world première of Sven-David Sandström’s Messiah was one of many examples of the Festival’s commitment to the bold and the new. In 2001 Helmuth Rilling won a Grammy Award for the Best Choral Performance of the Year for the Festival’s world première recording of Krzysztof Penderecki’s Credo. The Festival’s 1994 world première of Arvo Pärt’s Litany was the first American commission from the composer. Modern passion settings by Osvaldo Golijov and Tan Dun have been presented, and a biennial Composers Symposium under the direction of the University of Oregon’s Robert Kyr brings emerging composers to Eugene to study and have their music performed.

In 2010, the 40th anniversary program saw an unprecedented lineup of guest stars and a gala concert highlighted by a jam session with Thomas Quasthoff and Bobby McFerrin, and a series of videos celebrating different aspects of the Festival’s history.

Education has always been the heartbeat of the Festival. The Master Class in Conducting — a key program from the very beginning — offers advanced training in choral and orchestral conducting. Over the years it has served more than 1,200 conductors from across the U.S. as well as Brazil, Canada, Chile, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Russia, Switzerland, Taiwan, and Venezuela. The Stangeland Family Youth Choral Academy — added in 1998 — provides an intensive training and performing experience for high school singers from across the country, under the tutelage of inspiring conductor Anton Armstrong.

The Rilling format in Eugene, which combines master classes, lecture-demonstrations, and concerts, has become the model for the Internationale Bachakademie Stuttgart, which he founded in 1981, as well as for subsequent Bach academies in Eastern Europe, South America, and Asia.

The Festival’s catalog with Hänssler records includes ten titles, and Festival concerts have reached worldwide audiences through syndication on more than two hundred radio outlets coast-to-coast and beyond, through broadcasts on National Public Radio, American Public Radio, Voice of America, and both the British and Canadian Broadcasting Corporations. Writers from The Times (London) and major papers from Germany and Spain have hailed the event. Critics from this nation’s major media, including the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Examiner, and Washington Post, have described the Festival variously as “remarkable,” “excellent,” and “astonishing.”

As Festival artistry has grown, so has funding from such public and private supporters as Wells Fargo Private Bank, Lufthansa, Pepsi-Cola, Mercedes-Benz, KeyBank, the Oregon Arts Commission, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Paul Allen Foundation, and both the Silva Endowment and the Nils and Jewel Hult Endowment of the Arts Foundation of Western Oregon, through the Oregon Community Foundation.

Important individual contributions have come from thousands of citizens. In particular, the gifts of the Scharpf family and Bill Bowerman (University of Oregon track coach and co-founder of Nike) helped to perpetuate artistic funding during a critical time in the early 1980s. The $10 million Saltzman Endowment, completed in 2010, has provided additional funding stability.

Looking ahead to new generations, in 2011 the Festival named British conductor and keyboardist Matthew Halls as its artistic director designate, to assume leadership in 2013, when Helmuth Rilling takes the role of emeritus director during the year of his 80th birthday.

For more than four decades the masterworks of Bach have found enthusiastic and highly committed audiences in the Pacific Northwest through the Oregon Bach Festival. Expanding in geographic and artistic bounds under the leadership of Rilling and Evans, and soon, Matthew Halls, the Festival looks ahead to the challenge of taking its destiny — and Bach’s legacy — into the future.