Bach's Coffeehouse - Tafelmusik : Tafelmusik

Jeanne Lamon Hall, Trinity-St. Paul’s Centre

Café culture was alive and well long before Starbucks!

Bach’s legendary concert series at Zimmerman’s coffeehouse in Leipzig attracted a lively crowd that gathered to sip coffee, chat, and listen to music. Rachel Podger directs this program channelling the intimate, congenial atmosphere of the coffeehouse with her “chamber-like approach that sounds fantastically appropriate and vividly exciting” (Presto Music).

Recreating a night at Zimmerman’s, our program includes composers that Bach admired alongside his own works. Our night begins with Bach’s Orchestral Suite no. 3, famous for its gorgeous Air. Virtuoso playing comes front and centre in Vivaldi’s groundbreaking Concerto for 4 violins in B Minor and Telemann’s dramatic Concerto for 2 oboes and bassoon, while Handel’s Concerto Grosso, op. 6 no. 5 showcases the composer’s genius for blending national styles.

The spirit of creative exchange at Zimmerman’s is reflected in Gallo’s explosive variations on “La follia,” one of the most recognizable bass lines of the last 300 hundred years that also appears in Bach’s music.
Rachel Podger has unanimously won over Tafelmusik audiences, who can listen for the “delicacy of her dynamic shifts and decorative details” (The Times) in Bach’s Concerto for violin in G Minor. Reconstructed from an earlier harpsichord concerto, the work is best known for the soulful and lyrical solo in the second movement.

Box Office

Tafelmusik

(416) 964-6337 | Email

Running Time

120 minutes

Style of Music

Baroque orchestra

Guest artists

Rachel Podger

Principal guest director & violin soloist

Rachel Podger, “the unsurpassed British glory of the baroque violin” (The Times), has established herself as a leading interpreter of baroque and classical music. She was the first woman to be awarded the prestigious Royal Academy of Music/Kohn Foundation Bach Prize in October 2015, Gramophone Artist of the Year 2018, and the Ambassador for REMA’s Early Music Day 2020. A creative programmer, she is the founder and Artistic Director of Brecon Baroque Festival and her ensemble Brecon Baroque, is Patron of The Continuo Foundation, and an Ambassador for the Learned Society of Wales.

Rachel was awarded BBC Music Magazine Recording of the Year and Instrumental Award for her solo albumTutta sola. Recent releases include The Muses Restor’d with Brecon Baroque, The Best of Biber 1681 Sonatas, and Haydn Symphonies 43 & 49 with Tafelmusik, described as “sensational” (Early Music America). A dedicated educator, she holds the Micaela Comberti Chair for Baroque Violin at the Royal Academy of Music, and the Jane Hodge Foundation International Chair in Baroque Violin at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. Rachel also has a regular relationship with The Juilliard School in New York.

Rachel Podger took up the position of Principal Guest Director of Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra in September 2024.

Performers

Tafelmusik Orchestra, on period instruments
Directed by Rachel Podger

Program

Bach Orchestral Suite No. 3
Vivaldi Concerto for 4 violins in B minor, Op.3 no.10
Gallo Sonata no. 12 in G Minor, “La Follia”
Telemann Concerto for 2 oboes, TWV 53:d1
Bach Concerto for violin in g minor
Handel Concerto Grosso, op. 6, no. 5 + Chaconne from Terpsichore

Bach’s Coffeehouse