• Three performances on consecutive Saturday afternoons will be the first professional concerts held in the recently dedicated Smith Center for the Arts
• Musicians will use period instruments to replicate the musical sounds of the 18th century
• All musical selections will be from the works of Johann Sebastian Bach
  
  

Providence, RI -- Providence College's Department of Music will present a series of three concerts with the Newport Baroque Orchestra - all featuring the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. The Bachathon performances will be held in the Concert Hall of the Smith Center for the Arts on the following Saturdays at 2 p.m.:

Each performance will be preceded by a pre-concert lecture at 1:45 p.m. The concerts are open to the public with a charge of $10 per adult. Senior citizen tickets are priced at $7; students and children may attend at no charge.

The concert series was conceived by Dr. Catherine Gordon-Seifert, associate professor of music at Providence College, as an extension of a new, upper-level seminar for music majors at the College. Gordon-Seifert, a musicologist/harpsichordist, is teaching the course on the life and works of Bach, focusing largely on performance practice issues. Notes Gordon-Seifert, "There seemed no better way to demonstrate how Bach's music might have sounded than to sponsor a concert series that enabled students to experience Bach's music in the hands of professional performers on period instruments."

The Newport Baroque Orchestra - under the artistic direction of renowned harpischordist Paul Cienniwa - is a professional period-instrument orchestra devoted to the music of the 17th and 18th centuries. Instruments to be played at the concerts include harpsichord, traverso, violin, viola, violoncello, and violone.

According to Gordon-Seifert, "Between 1600 and 1750, musical instruments were built according to standards different from today's. Violins, violas, and cellos were strung in gut; bows had a different shape; trumpets and horns did not have valves; flutes were made of wood and had few keys; and the piano was not yet a viable instrument."

"As an orchestra specializing in music of the period, the Newport Baroque Orchestra presents concerts on historical instruments or modern replicas of those instruments," explains Gordon-Seifert. "The end result is the authentic reproduction of music as it might have been heard in earlier times." 

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