BACH 52

with Pamela Dellal,  Bach Institute Director & Intellectual Resources Curator This week on BACH 52, Nicholas Phan sits down with Pamela Dellal — alto, master translator, and director of the Bach Institute at Emmanuel Music — for a conversation about death, doubt, and why Bach's cantatas still speak to us today.Pam has translated Bach's cantata texts for Emmanuel Music for decades. She talks about the history of the ensemble under founder Craig Smith, how she became the church's "intellectual resources curator," and her vision for making Bach's music accessible to musicians and non-musicians alike. The conversation turns to two themes that run through nearly all of Bach's music: his fearless meditation on mortality (including the story behind Lorraine Hunt Lieberson's unforgettable final performances of "Ich habe genug") and his surprisingly modern portrayal of doubt.This episode's featured aria is "Komm, du süße Todesstunde" from Cantata 161, composed in Weimar in 1716.This project is a fiscally sponsored project of FRACTURED ATLAS.To find our more information and to make a TAX-DEDUCTIBLE donation to support the continuation of this project please visit:https://fundraising.fracturedatlas.org/nicholas-phan-recording-projects

Reginald Mobley on Race, Access & Why Bach Belongs to Everyonewith Reginald Mobley‍  ‍Grammy-nominated countertenor  programming consultant, Handel & Haydn SocietyGrammy-nominated countertenor Reginald Mobley joins tenor and host Nick Phan for a wide-ranging conversation about what it means to belong in classical music — and who gets to decide. Reginald grew up in Gainesville, Florida, raised by grandparents who told him that classical music "wasn't for us." Yet a badly-played fugue in sixth-grade band set off an obsession with Bach that has defined his career ever since. In this episode, Reggie traces his path from a church choir to a barbershop quartet gold medal, from a trumpet scholarship he never used to discovering he was a countertenor — and how Bach has been his constant companion through all of it. Their conversation moves from the personal to the philosophical: why calling Bach's music elitist is itself a form of gatekeeping, what it's like to bring Bach into a small Black Adventist church in the deep South or a jazz club in New Orleans, and how microaggressions in classical spaces compare to the reception he gets outside of them. Reggie also reflects on the parallel between Bach's music and the African American spiritual tradition — both born out of the same era, both using song to process grief, build community, and sustain human dignity. The aria for this episode is the third movement of BWV 36, Schwingt freudig euch empor, composed for the first Sunday in Advent — a duet for tenor and oboe d'amore whose text meditates on the soul's longing to be united with Christ, like a bride approaching a bridegroom.ARIADie Liebe zieht mit sanften Schritten from Schwingt freudig euch empor, BWV 36PERFORMERSNicholas Phan, tenorDebra Nagy, oboe d’amoreElisabeth Reed, cello Corey Jamason, organThis episode was filmed in partnership with Les Délices and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.This project is a fiscally sponsored project of FRACTURED ATLAS.To find our more information and to make a TAX-DEDUCTIBLE donation to support the continuation of this project please visit:https://fundraising.fracturedatlas.org/nicholas-phan-recording-projects

with Steven Zohn‍  ‍general editor, American Bach Society  musicologist, Temple UniversityIs it possible to separate great art from the flawed men who made it? In this episode of BACH 52, I sit down with Steven Zohn, General Editor of the American Bach Society and Professor of Musicology at Temple University, to talk about Bach, Shakespeare, and what we owe the canon.Steven and I get into why Bach's music resists becoming a museum piece, the surprising parallels between Bach and Shakespeare as two men who remain fundamentally unknowable to us, and how to teach centuries-old work by canonical white men in a moment that is, rightly, reckoning with the sins of the past. It all lands on the old idiom that gives this episode its name: are we in danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater?Stick around after the conversation for the aria, "Ich eile, die Lehren des Lebens zu hören" from Cantata 148, recorded with violinist Katie Hyun and Ruckus Early Music.This episode was filmed in partnership with Noe Music.This project is a fiscally sponsored project of FRACTURED ATLAS.To find our more information and to make a TAX-DEDUCTIBLE donation to support the continuation of this project please visit:https://fundraising.fracturedatlas.org/nicholas-phan-recording-projects

Bach, Community, the International Pride Orchestrawith Michael Roest‍  ‍founder & director, International Pride Orchestra  former Associate Dean of Academic Affairs, San Francisco Conservatory of MusicNicholas Phan sits down with Michael Roest — former Associate Dean of Academic Affairs at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and founder of the International Pride Orchestra — to explore what Bach's music has to do with identity, community, and belonging. Michael shares how music became foundational to his life from fifth grade in Kenosha, Wisconsin, through Oberlin and Juilliard — and how that sense of belonging through music eventually led him to create the IPO, a global ensemble bringing together LGBTQ+ musicians to perform, commission new works, and celebrate queer artistry on a world stage. Along the way, they dig into what makes Bach's music so singularly adaptable — why it can be played on practically any instrument, why it keeps sounding fresh no matter how many times you've heard the Cello Suites, and why Bach might just be the rare composer who doesn't over-notate, even with so many notes on the page. The episode closes with an aria from Cantata 90 — a terrifying, virtuosic tenor piece about the end of times, filmed with the SFCM Baroque Ensemble.ARIAEs reißet euch ein schrecklich' Ende from Es reißet euch ein schrecklich' Ende, BWV 90PERFORMERSSFCM Baroque Ensemble | Elisabeth Reed & Corey Jamason, directors  Violin 1: Carla Moore (leader), Alexandra Santon, Cynthia Black, Eliana Estrada  Violin 2: Pauline Kempf, Annemarie Schubert, Luke Chiang  Viola: Jennifer Redondas, Caitlin Keen  Cello: Octavio Mujica, Hasan Abualhaj  Bass: Farley Pearce  Organ: Yunyi JiSOUND (BWV 90 only):  Chanho Han & Jason O'Connell | VIDEO (BWV 90 only): Clubsoda Productions with Edgar Garcia assisting | VIDEO (Interview): Nicholas PhanThis episode was filmed in partnership with the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.This project is a fiscally sponsored project of FRACTURED ATLAS.To find our more information and to make a TAX-DEDUCTIBLE donation to support the continuation of this project please visit:https://fundraising.fracturedatlas.org/nicholas-phan-recording-projects

Carla Dirlikov Canales and I have known each other since we were teenagers growing up in the twin towns of Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, Michigan — we even sang together as fellow voice majors at the University of Michigan. Since then, Carla has built a career turning music into a tool for cultural diplomacy: a State Department cultural exchange mission to Mexico led her to found The Canales Project in 2016, and in 2023 she became the National Endowment for the Arts' first Senior Advisor and Envoy for Cultural Exchange. She's currently a fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School.In this episode, Carla and I talk about identity, curiosity, and how Bach — a working musician employed by the city of Leipzig — offers a surprising model for thinking about music's power to build bridges between people and cultures today.Stick around to the end for the aria: the tenor aria "Bleibt, ihr Engel, bleibt bei mir" from Cantata BWV 19, Es erhub sich ein Streit, featuring Dominic Favia on period natural trumpet.NOTE ABOUT THE TRUMPET:Dominic Favia, our trumpet player for this aria, played this on a true period instrument, which is to say that it has no valves and no finger holes. These instruments, which is how trumpets were designed in Bach’s time, are only able to play notes that occur naturally in its own overtone series, which means that some of these notes don’t quite line up in the same ways our ears are accustomed to hearing in our time of equally-tempered modern pianos. This is not a mistake by any means, but just the physics of the instrument and is what we imagine would have been the same sound Bach’s own trumpeters would have made and what Bach himself would have been accustomed to hearing.Learn more about BACH 52 at bach52.nicholas-phan.com.Learn more about Dominic's trumpet at https://www.dominicfavia.com/about-the-natural-trumpetBACH 52 Episode 21Bach as a Bridge-Builderwith Carla Dirlikov Canales,   mezzo-soprano;  founder, The Canales Project  ⁨@thecanalesproject2624⁩  & Nicholas Phan, tenorARIA Tenor Aria from Es erhub sich ein Streit, BWV 19PERFORMERSNicholas Phan, tenorDominic Favia, trumpetSan Francisco Conservatory of Music Baroque Ensemble  Corey Jamason & Elisabeth Reed, directorsThis project is a fiscally sponsored project of FRACTURED ATLAS.To find our more information and to make a TAX-DEDUCTIBLE donation to support the continuation of this project please visit:https://fundraising.fracturedatlas.org/nicholas-phan-recording-projects

Violinist Owen Dalby (St. Lawrence String Quartet, Stanford artist-in-residence) on why Bach's music works like a Rorschach test — and how it became his spiritual home.Owen Dalby has spent a lifetime leading an extraordinarily multifaceted musical life — performing at the highest levels while pushing the bounds of how classical music relates to community. For much of the last decade he toured the world as a member of the St. Lawrence String Quartet. Before that, he co-founded Decoda, a Carnegie Hall–affiliated collective formed around a single question: how do we make this art as relevant, as meaningful, as helpful to as many people as we can?That question runs through everything else in this episode: his early training with Anne Crowden at Berkeley's Crowden School, where chamber music was treated as a foundation for social-emotional learning; his discovery of baroque instruments and historical performance practice; the St. Matthew Passion, which he calls his "spiritual home" despite not being a believer; and his current work as co-director of Noe Music, the San Francisco chamber series he runs with his wife, violist Meena Bhasin.The aria for this episode is taken from BWV 177 featuring Owen Dalby, violin and Ruckus Early Music, recorded LIVE at Noe Music in San Francisco, CA in May 2022.This project is a fiscally sponsored project of FRACTURED ATLAS.To find our more information and to make a TAX-DEDUCTIBLE donation to support the continuation of this project please visit:https://fundraising.fracturedatlas.org/nicholas-phan-recording-projects

with Ellen Exner‍  ‍doctor of musicology  former Vice-President, American Bach SocietyIs Bach's music really for everyone? Musicologist Ellen Exner — vice president of the American Bach Society and a student of Christoph Wolff at Harvard — argues it isn't, and that the honest answer is more interesting than the comforting one. Recorded in Philadelphia while I was performing with the Philadelphia Orchestra, our conversation traces how Bach's sacred vocal music went nearly forgotten for fifty years after his death, only re-entering the concert world through Mendelssohn's Berlin revival of the St. Matthew Passion and the slow, complicated process of divorcing these cantatas from the Lutheran liturgy they were written for. We talk about canon, curriculum, and who gets to decide what belongs in it; what it means to perform theology you don't personally believe; and why Bach never imagined his music traveling beyond the small Leipzig world he wrote it for — let alone into a Hong Kong concert hall centuries later. Ellen's answer to the episode's central question — "Bach is for everybody who wants it" — reframes the whole project.The episode closes with the aria "Und du von Not erhörte Kreatur" from Cantata BWV 121, Christum wir sollen loben schon, written for the second day of Christmas 1724. Scored for tenor and oboe d'amore, it turns the shepherds' encounter with the infant Christ into a meditation on scale — the vast creator made small and pitiable to save the flesh through flesh. It's a fitting close to a conversation about music built for one specific time, place, and purpose that somehow keeps finding new listeners who want it.Full episode credits, transcript, and video can be found at: https://www.bach52.nicholas-phan.com/episodes/ep3This project is a fiscally sponsored project of FRACTURED ATLAS.To find our more information and to make a TAX-DEDUCTIBLE donation to support the continuation of this project please visit:https://fundraising.fracturedatlas.org/nicholas-phan-recording-projects

Is the music of Bach for everyone? In Episode 2 of BACH 52, I sit down with oboist and artistic director Debra Nagy to explore this question through the lens of historical performance, personal belief, and the universal human emotions that Bach's music somehow captures across centuries and cultures.Debra is the artistic director of Les Délices and one of the most thoughtful advocates for baroque music I know. Raised in the conservative Jewish tradition and now identifying as culturally Jewish and agnostic, she shares something deeply personal with me: how Bach's profoundly Christian music still resonates with her experience of humanity, grief, loss, and connection. We talk about why the St. Matthew Passion moves non-believers to tears, how baroque instruments create colors and emotions that modern instruments simply can't access, and what it means to find your life's calling through the intimate dialogue between voice and period instruments.We also explore the fascinating world of the baroque oboe and oboe d'amore, instruments that Debra describes as having "more color, more humanity, more emotion" than their modern counterparts. You'll hear the difference in our featured performance of BWV 166 "Ich will an den Himmel denken," a rarely-heard aria that showcases exactly why these historical instruments matter so much.This conversation is about more than just music. It's about how Bach builds community across time, how his cantatas speak to our deepest experiences of mortality and love, and why engaging with this music on its own terms opens up something profound and universal.Watch the episode and see full episode credits at https://www.bach52.nicholas-phan.com/episodes/ep2This project is a fiscally sponsored project of FRACTURED ATLAS.To find our more information and to make a TAX-DEDUCTIBLE donation to support the continuation of this project please visit:https://fundraising.fracturedatlas.org/nicholas-phan-recording-projects

On bringing people together from three states and 92 zip codes through musicwith Matthew Swanson | director of choruses, Cincinnati May FestivalMatthew Swanson has spent the last several years working with one of the great American choral institutions: the Cincinnati May Festival, the oldest choral festival in the Western Hemisphere, founded in 1873 by a community that decided singing together was worth building an entire tradition around. After working with the May Festival in various capacities for many years, he took over as Director of Choruses in 2024, and now serves as Artistic Head of the organization, overseeing a number of choruses, for singers of all levels and ages, as well as conducting the organization’s flagship choir, the May Festival Chorus, the official chorus of the Cincinnati Symphony and Cincinnati Pops orchestras.Nick sat down with him this past May, right in the middle of a week where they were on stage together performing Stravinsky and Orff — music that, on the surface, seems about as far from Bach as one can get, even though both composers clearly owe a great debt to Bach, like most Western classical composers.The May Festival Chorus draws its singers from three different states and 92 different zip codes — a genuinely wide cross-section of a region that is deeply politically purple, not red or blue. Rather than treating that diversity of belief as something to work around, Matthew talked about it as part of the point: a room full of people who likely disagree with each other on a variety of political and religious touchpoints, choosing every Tuesday night to arrive at the same time, the same pitch, the same vowel, in pursuit of something beautiful that none of them could make alone.It’s a small, weekly act of common purpose in an era where that kind of communal activity seems to be getting harder to find — and it illuminates another layer to our central question: is Bach’s music, or any music this demanding, actually for everyone?The episode closes with the tenor aria Was willst du dich, mein Geist, entsetzen from Bach's Cantata BWV 8, Liebster Gott, wenn werd ich sterben. Performed by Nicholas Phan, tenor; Debra Nagy, oboe; Corey Jamason, organ; and Elisabeth Reed, cello.Watch the episode and see full episode credits at https://www.bach52.nicholas-phan.com/episodes/ep19This project is a fiscally sponsored project of FRACTURED ATLAS.To find our more information and to make a TAX-DEDUCTIBLE donation to support the continuation of this project please visit:https://fundraising.fracturedatlas.org/nicholas-phan-recording-projects

How Sacred Music Holds Space for Everyonewith Reverend Pamela Werntz | rector, Emmanuel ChurchIs Bach's sacred music only for believers? Reverend Pamela Werntz, Rector of Boston's Emmanuel Church, thinks otherwise. In this episode of BACH 52, she shares how Bach's cantatas create space for an extraordinarily diverse community — from musicians and scholars to people sleeping in the church garden — and why that radical welcome is at the heart of what this music can do. Emmanuel Music has performed Bach cantatas in their liturgical context for over 50 years. Their Bach Institute brings emerging professional artists to study this music not just as performance, but as living spiritual practice.The aria for this episode is Ich steh mit einem Fuß im Grabe from Cantata BWV 156, recorded with the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Baroque Ensemble, directed by Elisabeth Reed and Corey Jamason, with special guest SFCM soprano Chea Kang.Watch the episode and see full episode credits at https://www.bach52.nicholas-phan.com/episodes/ep8This project is a fiscally sponsored project of FRACTURED ATLAS.To find our more information and to make a TAX-DEDUCTIBLE donation to support the continuation of this project please visit:https://fundraising.fracturedatlas.org/nicholas-phan-recording-projects

Was Bach A Radical Conservative?with Jeremy Denk | pianist & authorPianist and author Jeremy Denk joins Grammy-winning tenor Nicholas Phan for a wide-ranging conversation about Johann Sebastian Bach — why his music feels both ancient and startlingly modern, why younger generations are drawn to him more than ever, and what it means that Bach was, in Jeremy's words, a true "get off my lawn" kind of composer: working stubbornly against the fashions of his time while somehow pointing toward the future. Along the way, Jeremy and Nick explore the interpretive freedom hidden inside Bach's spare notation, the "hidden drum track" that animates even his most contrapuntal writing, and why the Goldberg Variations changed Jeremy's technique, his musical thinking, and his life. They also touch on Jeremy's memoir Every Good Boy Does Fine, which includes an unexpectedly illuminating chapter connecting Bach's harmonic tension to… well, you'll have to listen. The aria for this episode is from Cantata 171, Gott, wie dein Name, so ist auch dein Ruhm (God, just as your name, so shall your praise be), likely premiered on New Year's Day, 1729 — performed with Ruckus Early Music recorded live at Noe Music in San Francisco, CA in May 2022.Full episode credits, transcript, and video can be found at: https://www.bach52.nicholas-phan.com/ This project is a fiscally sponsored project of FRACTURED ATLAS.To find our more information and to make a TAX-DEDUCTIBLE donation to support the continuation of this project please visit:https://fundraising.fracturedatlas.org/nicholas-phan-recording-projects

Grammy-winning tenor Nicholas Phan introduces BACH 52 and the question at its heart: Is Johann Sebastian Bach's music really for everyone?Nick shares his own journey with Bach — from childhood violin lessons to a 20-year career singing this music on stages from Leipzig to Lincoln Center — and the personal reckoning that sparked this project. As a gay biracial singer navigating the classical music world, he explores the tension between an art form that has the power to transform lives and institutions that have historically excluded the very people that art could serve.This episode features the tenor recitative and aria from Cantata BWV 7, performed with Ruckus Early Music recorded live at Noe Music in San Francisco, CA in May 2022.Full episode credits, transcript, and video can be found at: https://www.bach52.nicholas-phan.com/ This project is a fiscally sponsored project of FRACTURED ATLAS.To find our more information and to make a TAX-DEDUCTIBLE donation to support the continuation of this project please visit:https://fundraising.fracturedatlas.org/nicholas-phan-recording-projects