About the Program

The Roy Cockrum Chamber Series opens with Bach & Bluegrass, a program that places the music of Johann Sebastian Bach alongside bluegrass and bluegrass-inspired works. Music Director Aram Demirjian doesn’t claim a historical connection between the traditions. Instead, he hears a natural affinity in their transparency and in the prominent roles both give to strings and plucked instruments.

Bach provides a musical foundation throughout the program, from the Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 and the familiar Air from his Orchestral Suite No. 3 to selections from the St. Matthew Passion, The Art of the Fugue, and A Musical Offering. The Third Brandenburg Concerto showcases an ensemble of strings in nine parts: three each of violins, violas, and cellos.

Mandolinist Jeff Midkiff, a longtime KSO collaborator, joins the orchestra for a program that includes his own A Visit from the Muse and Run for Your Life!, along with Bill Monroe’s Monroe’s Hornpipe in an arrangement by Midkiff. The program also features Mark O’Connor’s Appalachia Waltz and Jennifer Higdon’s Mandolin Concerto. Higdon composed the concerto during the pandemic as an expression of her belief that the world would emerge stronger from a period of tremendous loss.

The connections extend beyond musical style. Caroline Shaw’s Punctum draws directly on Bach, quoting the chorale “Erkenne mich” from his St. Matthew Passion, which the audience will hear immediately before Shaw’s work. Later, Bach’s Contrapunctus XIII from The Art of the Fugue appears in its original and inverted forms with Monroe’s Hornpipe placed between them.

The concert concludes with the six-voice Ricercar from Bach’s A Musical Offering, heard in an arrangement for strings by Demirjian. The work traces its origins to Bach’s 1747 visit to the court of Frederick the Great, where the king challenged Bach to improvise a fugue on a theme of his own creation. Bach later developed that royal theme into the collection that became A Musical Offering.