The Dryden Ensemble Presents ANNA MAGDALENA BACH: HER STORY Next Weekend
The event is on Sunday, February 5 at 3:00 p.m. at the Princeton Theological Seminary Chapel.
The Dryden Ensemble presents "Anna Magdalena Bach: Her Story" on Sunday, February 5 at 3:00 p.m. at the Princeton Theological Seminary Chapel, 64 Mercer Street, Princeton, NJ. This concert is free and open to the public.
The concert is a special event based on the life of Anna Magdalena Bach, Bach's second wife. It features a sequence of poems written by Jane McKinley interspersed with chamber music by J. S. Bach and others, performed by Lisa Terry, cello and viola da gamba, and Webb Wiggins, harpsichord. Anna Magdalena was a well-paid, professional singer at the court of Prince Leopold in Cöthen where Bach was serving as Kapellmeister when his first wife Maria Barbara died in July 1720, leaving him as a widower with four young children. When he married Anna Magdalena in December 1721, she was only 20. She bore him thirteen children, only six of whom survived past the age of five. Very little is actually known about daily life in the Bach household; the poems rely on surviving letters and documents as points of departure. Subjects include Anna Magdalena's famous Notebook, written requests by Bach's cousin for carnation plants and a caged bird, and some "extra fine" chamber music performed in the Bach home when his son Wilhelm Friedemann visited from Dresden in 1739.
The musical program features movements from Bach's Suites for Unaccompanied Violoncello, as well as pieces from Anna Magdalena's Notebooks, including Bach's French Suites for harpsichord, which he copied out for Anna Magdalena in 1722, in the months after they married.
The Dryden Ensemble's series continues on March 25 and 26 with a concert entitled "Pergolesi & Bach," a memorial to those who died during the pandemic. The program features soprano Teresa Wakim and mezzo-soprano Kristen Dubenion-Smith in arias by J. S. Bach and Pergolesi's Stabat Mater, a work written in the final weeks of the composer's short life. Also on the program is Schmelzer's Lament on the Death of Ferdinand III, both of whom died of the plague in the 17th century.
On Sunday, April 16, 2023, the ensemble concludes its season with a special theatrical entertainment. The details will be announced soon.
Tickets for the March and April concerts are available online at drydenensemble.org.
More Hot Stories For You

April 1, 2023
Centenary Stage Company's Women Playwrights Series will kick off with a reading of Abducted by Michele Aldin Kushner. The reading will take place on Wednesday, April 5th at 7:30 pm in the Sitnik Theatre of the Lackland Performing Arts Center at 715 Grand Avenue, Hackettstown, NJ on the campus of Centenary University.

March 31, 2023
Get Ready, New Jersey!!!! International award-winning actor, producer, and comedian Chris Tucker is hitting the big stage in Newark at New Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJPAC) on Thursday, April 20, at 8 pm.

March 31, 2023
Kean Theatre Conservatory presents Animal Farm from March 24 to April 1st in the Bauer Boucher Theatre Center.

March 31, 2023
Centenary Stage Company, a not-for-profit professional theater in NW NJ, is thrilled to announce auditions for its Summer Stock Season. This summer CSC will present Rock of Ages and Seussical the Musical. Auditions will take place on May 4th and May 5th from 6 -10pm at the Centenary Stage Company located at 715 Grand Ave, Hackettstown NJ.

March 31, 2023
Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, actor, and writer G. Riley Mills will present this spring's Gates-Ferry Distinguished Visiting Lecture at Centenary University on Monday, April 10.