Jeannette Sorrell/Photo: Brandon Bott

“I definitely feel that the music of Bach is inherently spiritual,” says Apollo’s Fire founder and artistic director Jeannette Sorrell. “Whether there are words or not, even his instrumental music is inherently spiritual. He was famous for saying that the purpose of all music is the glory of God and the refreshment of the spirit. You really feel that. And that’s what we all need right now.”

To cap off a season spotlighting the music of Bach, Apollo’s Fire will be performing what is often considered his greatest work, the “Mass in b minor.”

Can Sorrell recall her first awareness of the piece?

“When I was in high school, I became pretty obsessed with the period-instrument recordings that were coming out from Europe and the U.K. at that time, the major works of Monteverdi and Bach and Mozart. So I think that I probably bought my John Eliot Gardiner CD of the b minor Mass when I was in high school or maybe at the beginning of college. So yeah, I’ve loved this music for a very long time.”

Can Sorrell recall the first time that she heard Bach’s “Mass in b minor” live?

“I have never heard it live other than leading concerts of it with Apollo’s Fire. I don’t think I’ve ever been to a performance by another group of this piece.”

Does performing it intimidate Sorrell, given its monumental status in the repertoire?

“To be honest, for me, having almost grown up in the early music world, the piece doesn’t seem so intimidating and monumental. It kind of plays itself pretty naturally if you’re playing it on the instruments that Bach wrote for and if you have singers who have been trained in that style. I’ve always found that, frankly, both of the Bach Passions and the b minor Mass go pretty easily in rehearsal for us.

“But I do know that when a symphony orchestra takes on a piece like this, it’s very challenging because trying to do this kind of music with modern instruments and larger forces and a larger string section, it creates so many challenges because the modern instruments are much more opaque-sounding. The texture becomes muddy and it’s quite difficult for the musicians to hear each other. If the ensemble is large, they end up being quite far apart on the stage and things can fall apart. I’m aware that some very topnotch symphony orchestra performances of the b minor Mass have kind of famously fallen apart in concerts. But for a period instrument ensemble like us, it’s really not that challenging.

“What’s amazing is that so much of the piece is really extroverted and amazingly celebratory and festive: three trumpets, timpani, the wooden flutes in a period orchestra and oboes, they’re so delightfully chirpy. It’s not like the ‘St. Matthew Passion’ which is so somber and melancholy throughout. Much of the b minor Mass is very festive.”

It remains a curiosity that while Bach was a cantor charged with composing and preparing music for weekly Lutheran church services in Leipzig, he was fascinated enough with the form of the Roman Catholic Mass to compose a setting. It was a form which had no practical use for his position and in fact, was not performed until over a century after Bach’s death.

“Lutherans have a much shorter Mass than the Catholics but at least the ‘Credo’ and the ‘Gloria,’ I think, are familiar to Lutherans today. Those are part of the church liturgy in a lot of churches today. But there are several additional movements that would not be familiar to a Lutheran. I actually happened to grow up in a Lutheran church and I was a church music director for about eighteen years, actually, starting at the age of fifteen, so for the first half of my life.”

Because Bach never performed the “Mass in b minor,” there are diverse opinions about the number of forces he might have used if he had. Modern performances are often large-scale.

“He really did not have the forces for this piece. The forces we use are typical and ideal for a period group. So we have four first violins, three seconds, two violas, two cellos, three trumpets, two flutes, two oboes. It’s the instrumentation that Bach called for. The chorus is about the same size as the orchestra so it’s about twenty-to-twenty-two in the orchestra and the same number in the chorus. And that’s how I think Baroque sacred music was done and works best.”

Curtain call at Apollo’s Fire performance of Handel’s “Messiah” at St. James Cathedral, Chicago, December 15, 2024/Photo: Brandon Bott

As was true in Bach’s time, the vocal soloists are also part of the chorus.

“That makes the chorus fantastic, but the chorus is not only the soloists. There are additional singers.”

Has Sorrell always had a special affinity for Bach?

“I’ve really loved Bach’s music, probably since I was thirteen or so. At that time, I was a pianist and was also singing in choirs. I also played the violin, but not as seriously. I was pretty focused on piano. Bach’s d minor harpsichord concerto was my favorite piece in the entire world when I was eighteen, which was when I switched to harpsichord. Being able to play this music on period instruments, which started happening for me in my mid-twenties, was just so joyful and so exciting.”

Although the stalwart modern-instrument Music of the Baroque is in its fifty-fourth season, the early music scene in Chicago has consisted of several period-instrument orchestras such as The City Musick, Basically Bach and Baroque Band that have come and gone over the years.

“Hopefully, Apollo’s Fire will break that pattern.”

The fact that the internationally renowned northeast Ohio-based ensemble has been willing to commute to Chicago to establish a regular series here has been a remarkable boon.

“We’re really used to being on the road. We’re kind of set up for that in a way because we always have done a lot of touring.

“Chicago is obviously a very large and sophisticated city that did not have a permanent regular period instrument Baroque orchestra. There’s the Newberry Consort, which is wonderful, but that’s earlier repertoire. And Haymarket Opera is wonderful, but that’s opera.

“The big impetus was that we were engaged to play on the University of Chicago UC Presents series in 2016. And at the end of that concert, we were all mobbed by members of the audience. It seemed like half of the audience stood in line to talk to us. And they were all saying things like, ‘You need to come more often.’ ‘You should come two or three times a year.’ ‘What are you doing here next?’ So we decided to try and we’re now in our fourth season.

“We’ve been really delighted and surprised that the audience for our concerts has grown so quickly. This is only our fourth season, but in Evanston, our concerts have been sold out for the past two years. This is only our second year of playing in Chicago and we’re just in the very early stages of building an audience downtown. But our ‘Messiah’ concert was sold out two weeks in advance downtown at St. James Cathedral. We hope that can happen for the b minor Mass as well. We’ve even changed the Evanston Saturday performance time to 2pm to accommodate that being the first night of Passover.

Where does Sorrell see the “Mass in b minor” in Bach’s overall output?

“I think the ‘Mass in b minor’ is his most exuberant choral work and probably his most virtuosic piece. Well, Bach has many, highly virtuosic pieces, such as the Brandenburg Concertos, which we did in October. So we’re really thrilled to be bookending the season with these two virtuosic pieces by Bach. One being instrumental in the fall and then his choral masterpiece in the spring.

“And the other thing I’d like to say is that Bach, I feel, is exceptionally healing for the soul. His music, you know, his music just helps us connect with what’s good in the universe. And at a time like this, I think the concert is very timely.”

Apollo’s Fire performs Bach’s “Mass in b minor” at St. James Cathedral, 65 East Huron, April 11, 7:30pm; and First Presbyterian Church of Evanston, 1427 Chicago Avenue, Evanston, April 12, 2pm, apollosfire.org.