BACH 52

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...

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 memb...

with Ellen Exner

‍  ‍doctor of musicology

  former Vice-President, American Bach Society

Is 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...

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...

On bringing people together from three states and 92 zip codes through music

with Matthew Swanson | director of choruses, Cincinnati May Festival

Matthew 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...

How Sacred Music Holds Space for Everyone

with Reverend Pamela Werntz | rector, Emmanuel Church

Is 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 radic...

Was Bach A Radical Conservative?

with Jeremy Denk | pianist & author

Pianist 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 stubbor...

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 ...