Music & Events

Bach never wrote an opera, but this concert features the closest approximation we have: the exquisite monologues and duets of his cantatas Vergnügte Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust and Liebster Jesu, mein Verlangen. Cantata 32 uses the poetry of the Song of Songs to model a dialogue between Jesus, the expression of the divine, and Soul, embodying humanity.  

Elisse Albian, soprano; Elisa Sutherland, alto; Enrico Lagasca, bass; Trinity Baroque Orchestra; led by Avi Stein, organ 

Gail Archer is a professor at Barnard College and Columbia University and founder of Musforum, an international network for women organists. Her repertoire spans the 16th to 20th centuries, and she is one of the first American women to play Olivier Messiaen’s complete works, earning praise from The New York Times for mixing a “compelling authority” and “bracing physicality” with “a sense of vulnerability and awe.”

Hear a jazz quartet helmed by classically trained pianist and composer Helen Sung, a Guggenheim Fellow and winner of the Kennedy Center’s Mary Lou Williams Jazz Piano Competition. Sung graduated from the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Performance and has worked with such luminaries as Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter, Wynton Marsalis, MacArthur Fellow Regina Carter, the late Clark Terry, and Grammy winners Terri Lyne Carrington and Cecile McLorin Salvant.   

This season’s Jazz at One, Long Walk to Freedom, is inspired by Nelson Mandela and the 30th anniversary of South African democracy. Presented in collaboration with JAZZ HOUSE KiDS. 

Award-winning pianist Billy Childs and his Billy Childs Trio open the Jazz Icons series. Widely recognized for his original compositions and arrangements, Childs garnered a 2013 Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship (2009), 17 Grammy nominations, and six Grammy awards. As a pianist, he has performed with Freddie Hubbard, J.J. Johnson, Yo-Yo Ma, Sting, Renee Fleming, Chick Corea, Wynton Marsalis, and many others. The Los Angeles Times praised Childs’s “improvisatory skills and powerful sense of swing.” 

Trinity presents Jazz Icons in collaboration with JAZZ HOUSE KiDS, to showcase some of the most prolific and influential artists in jazz history. 

In his last post as a music director in Leipzig, Bach led a concert series — in a coffeehouse in winter and a beer garden in summer — that featured works like George Frideric Handel’s fiery Concerto in D Minor, as well as such visiting virtuosi as violinist Georg Pisendel, whose arrangement of Jean-Féry Rebel’s Les Caractères de la danse is a medley of popular French dances of the time. Today’s program also includes a suite of opera hits by Jean-Philippe Rameau, and Bach’s own Prelude and Fugue in E Minor. 

Trinity Baroque Orchestra; led by Avi Stein, harpsichord 

Organist Jennifer McPherson Mulhern has earned acclaim for her interpretations of early music, including as a prize winner in the Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck Organ Competition held in Amsterdam. The music director at Saint John’s Episcopal Church in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, she holds degrees from the College of the Holy Cross and the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. 

Trinity’s lead organist and prominent early music expert Avi Stein performs Johann Sebastian Bach’s Concerto in D Minor, accompanied by members of the Trinity Baroque Orchestra. George Frideric Handel’s Concerto in F Major and Thomas Augustine Arne’s Concerto in G Minor are also on the program. 

Trinity Baroque Orchestra; Avi Stein, organ