CARMEL-BY-THE-SEA, Calif. — What’s in a name? Despite its headline namesake, the Carmel Bach Festival, Monterey County’s distinguished annual summer festival, has never been literal-minded about its musical mission. When impresarios Dene Denny and Hazel Watrous founded it in 1935, they chose Bach merely because it was the German master’s semiquincentennial. For the next year or two, it even contemplated headlining Mozart instead of Bach, and by its sixth year it was regularly featuring broader fare.
Nine decades later, it’s still named Bach, though he figures in only eight of the 2026 festival’s 14 main concerts and prominently in only four of them. But dig deeper into the rich menu of specialty shows and performances and chamber and foyer concerts, and you’ll find enough Bach (including an all-Bach organ recital and a concert dedicated to his cantatas) to satisfy the most ardent devotee.
The Carmel Bach Festival, in other words, honors its brand and history not by clinging to its namesake but by putting him in juxtaposed play with new or ignored works and living or neglected composers. Call it a collage-like liberation from the museum pedestal. If anything, the festival’s catholic mission, with Bach as North Star, has intensified under artistic director and principal conductor Grete Pedersen, now in her fourth season. As festival marketing director Becca Lancaster said July 13, “Grete’s point is, when Bach was writing, he was contemporary, and so we should continue to treat him as such because he was writing for people who were actively listening, and Grete wants people to approach that music in the same way today, actively listening. How does Bach apply to them? What does he evoke?”
Thus, in addition to Angélica Negrón, this year’s featured composer, the 2026 festival champions music by living composers Nils Henrik Asheim, Ramona Luengen, Stephen Andrew Taylor, and Mike Marshall and by non-canonical composers from Jean-Féry Rebel and Antonio Lotti to Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, Frank Martin, Paul Hindemith, and Bohuslav Martinů.
That the festival does Bach reverently, often, and well was vividly confirmed during a three-day sampling of four concerts across three venues July 13-15 (the festival runs July 11-25). On July 14, choral conductor Andrew Megill led the Festival Orchestra and Festival Chorale in luminous readings of two Bach Leipzig cantatas, BWV 39 (“Brich dem Hungrigen dein Brot”) and 105 (“Herr, gehe nicht ins Gericht”), at Sunset Center Theater, the festival’s main venue in Carmel-by-the-Sea.
Backed by a 25-member chorale whose clear diction, wide dynamic range, and unexpectedly powerful sound belied its size, Reginald Mobley’s assuring, benedictory countertenor eloquently counterbalanced baritone Paul Max Tipton’s stern earnestness. Clara Rottsolk’s radiant soprano delivered just the right measure of faithful humility. The outward focus of BWV 39 — extending mercy through charity — was a contrast to the inward aura of BWV 105, which petitions God for mercy for sins unnamed. Here, Tipton, Mobley, and Rottsolk shifted smoothly into almost dramatic roles. The Festival Orchestra played with crisp power, trumpeter Stephen Marquardt realizing Bach’s enigmatic corno part by alternating a nine-foot B-flat natural trumpet with a coiled instrument of the same length.
Sandwiched between the two cantatas was Antonio Lotti’s clement Missa Sapientiae (c. 1730), which leavened Bach’s Teutonic severity with its “complete Italian sunshine, limoncello, and gelato,” as Megill put it. With soprano Molly Quinn, tenor Thomas Cooley, and baritone Edward Nelson joining Tipton, Mobley, and Rottsolk, the six complemented each other uncannily — vocal chamber music for the soul. Reinforcing the orchestra for “Domine Deus,” flutist Stephen Schultz’s traverso joined Rottsolk and oboist Gonzalo Ruiz in a trio that fairly glowed.
But the first of this listener’s four-concert festival sampling was a curatorially safe but commandingly played July 13 program featuring Handel’s Water Music, Horn Concerto in F major (HWV 331). and Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Led with dry humor from the concertmaster’s chair by English violinist Peter Hanson, the orchestra’s spirited playing injected this exceptionally familiar music with verve, ebullience, even swagger. Hornists Elisabeth Axtell and Leslie Hart’s bravura, beautifully toned performance of their valveless Baroque horns, bells raised, was worth the price of admission. The program as printed was reordered so all the Handel pieces were performed in the first half and Vivaldi’s ubiquitous calling-card — supported with modest lighting effects — filled the second.
As if to balance the warhorse with the curatorially inspired, the festival’s next concert July 14 at All Saints’ Episcopal Church featured the kind of program (Roaring Twenties) that makes the festival such a treat: Poulenc’s Le bal masqué, Martinů’s La revue de cuisine (about a love triangle among kitchen utensils), and Stravinsky’s Octet for Wind Instruments — delivered by a crack ensemble of musicians and fast-rising baritone Nelson. With humor and a born actor’s instinct, he vividly animated the louche characters of Poulenc and surrealist poet Max Jacob’s delicious “profane cantata.” If Martinů’s jazz-inflected 1927 ballet music paled in comparison, the ensemble’s tight, personality-rich playing injected such humanity and musicality into Stravinsky’s Octet that its composer’s intent, to announce his neoclassical phase, seemed secondary. The ensemble’s elite playing notwithstanding, this was Nelson’s afternoon.
The same spliced synergy Pedersen sought by interleaving Haydn’s Seasons with Norwegian composer Asheim’s Muota – Language of Snow on July 11 (which I did not hear) was used to striking effect in the festival’s revelatory Nature’s Poet concert at the gracefully aging Carmel Mission on July 15. In a Rainer Maria Rilke-themed program, four movements of Frank Martin’s magisterial Mass for Double Choir (1922-26) were interlaced with Six Chansons by Hindemith (1939), the Giga from Bach’s Violin Partita No. 2 (BWV 1004), Rautavaara’s stunning Die erste Elegie (1993), and “Only Yes,” Stephen Andrew Taylor’s sensitive setting of a Rilke letter.
Some Martin purists might have winced to see his five-movement masterpiece truncated, but the unifying Rilke theme, the Mission’s numinous grandeur, and, most of all, the superb performances of the Festival Chorale (led again by Megill) and violinist Cristina Zacharias cast a spell that was amplified by staging decisions (e.g., using red-robed candle-bearers to lead choristers to/from the altar and bid goodnight afterward). The sacral was so palpable that the audience withheld applause until the end, except for Zacharias’ Bach Giga, which demanded immediate acknowledgement. The only quibble was the absence of texts (German original and translated English) to guide those without photographic recall of Rilke’s poetry (texts would also have helped non-Francophones in the Roaring Twenties concert).
Over its nine plus decades, the Carmel Bach Festival has carved out a unique place in California’s competitive summer season. It surpassed its pre-pandemic ticket sale record last summer and beat that this summer by selling out all its 2026 season passes before opening night. Marketing director Lancaster said its three-day passes sell “like hotcakes.” With a respectable $13 million endowment, executive director Nathan Lutz, now in his third season, says growing it is “a crucial part of the puzzle.” There is talk of expanding the festival’s duration.
“We’re definitely trying to evolve the festival,” Lutz said. “Next summer is our 90th festival, and we’re taking the opportunity to explore with all the artistic leadership how making it feel different might look. There’s parts that we don’t want to touch at all — the culture and the family feeling of the festival. But in terms of the structure of the concerts, we’re happy to experiment with that. Grete definitely has a very experimental kind of approach.”
When the Carmel Bach festival was founded, its sales pitch was (I quote) “Spend your vacation in Carmel-by-the-Sea. Include the Carmel Bach Festival in your vacation schedule.” The charms of Carmel-by-the-Sea and Monterey County haven’t faded, but given the quality and variety of the festival today, an updated pitch might go: “Make your vacation the Carmel Bach Festival; enjoy Carmel-by-the-Sea between concerts.”
