submitted by The Salish Sea Early Music Festival

The Salish Sea Early Music Festival offers a rare opportunity to hear the complete Musical Offering and other chamber music by Johann Sebastian Bach on period instruments with German harpsichordist Hans-Jürgen Schnoor, baroque violinist Ingrid Matthews and baroque flutist Jeffrey Cohan in Bach’s Musical Offering on Wednesday, April 20 at 7 p.m. at Grace Church, 70 Sunset Lane in Lopez Village on Lopez Island.

Bach walked for two days to hear Dietrich Buxtehude at St. Mary’s Church in Lübeck, where Schnoor currently is organist and holds one of the most coveted and history-laden positions as keyboardist in all of Europe. Ingrid Matthews founded and directed the Seattle Baroque Orchestra, and Cohan directs the Salish Sea Early Music Festival.

The Musical Offering was initiated in 1747 when Frederick the Great, King Frederick II of Prussia, himself a superb flutist, gave to Bach a complicated theme upon which Bach improvised to the astonishment of all present. Within the next few weeks Bach perfected and presented to Frederick a composition which exhibits Bach’s boundless imagination and profound depth of expression in a brilliant set of canons and fugues, and a trio sonata that is without parallel in 18th-century chamber music, all based on this royal theme. The 6-part fugue is the most significant keyboard work ever written according to musicologist Charles Rosen. Also on the program will be two trio sonatas for violin, flute and harpsichord, and the Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue for solo harpsichord, all by Johann Sebastian Bach.

Eighteen and under are free. Please see www.salishseafestival.org/lopez or call Grace Episcopal Church at (360) 468-3477 for more information.