An Amherst festival dedicated to a famous Baroque composer is coming … Bach.

The University of Massachusetts Amherst will host its 2025 UMass Bach Festival and Symposium from Friday, April 25, through Sunday, April 27. The biennial festival last took place in-person in 2023 after the pandemic forced it to go virtual in 2021.

The festival began in 2015, the year after UMass grad student (and now festival co-founder and co-producer) Amanda Stenroos wore a t-shirt to a violin lesson with professor Elizabeth Chang (now also a co-producer) from Baldwin Wallace Conservatory’s Bach Festival. From there, Chang got the idea to start a similar festival at UMass. Since then, more than 5,000 people have attended its concerts and symposia.

“It really shines a light on how much we have to offer as a department within this institution,” Chang said.

Stenroos agreed: one of the festival’s strengths is the way in which it “really does bring together a lot of different types of people,” including current students, alumni, faculty members, professionals from the music world, and members of the public.

“It’s this big, big collaboration,” she said, “and I think at the heart of it is the really wonderful experience the students get to see.”

This year, after several weeks of “Prelude” events at UMass and in the community (most of which have will have ended by press time), the festival will officially kick off with a performance of Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” in Bezanson Recital Hall on Friday, April 25, at 4 p.m, played by Steven Beck.

From 7:30 to 9 p.m., also in Bezanson Recital Hall, professor emeritus of musicology Ernest May and visiting associate professor of music history Evan MacCarthy will moderate the panel discussion “J. S. Bach and the 21st Century Canon.”

Saturday will kick off at 9:15 a.m. in Bezanson with opening remarks by Matthew Westgate, chair of the college’s Music and Dance Department. Throughout the rest of the day, there will be symposium sessions with the topics “Performance,” “Pedagogy,” “Scholarship,” and “Global Bach Reception,” plus a keynote address at 1:15 p.m. about “Historical Bach Performance in the 21st Century.”

The UMass Bach Festival Orchestra and Chamber Choir will perform “Brandenburg Concerto No. 5” and “Christmas Oratorio, Parts I-III” at Grace Episcopal Church at 7:30 p.m.

Sunday will feature a recital of Bach’s “Coffee Cantata” (in English) at noon at Amherst Coffee, a period performance by alumni musicians. At 3 p.m., the UMass Bach Festival Orchestra and Chamber Choir will repeat their Saturday night performance, again at Grace Episcopal Church but at 3 p.m. (“When we’ve done only one concert,” Chang said, “we couldn’t fit everyone in!”)

The next Bach Festival won’t be until 2027, but it will be a monumental year with a very notable celebration: the 300th anniversary of the “St. Matthew Passion,” an oratorio of the Easter story, which premiered in Leipzig, Germany, in 1727. In a statement in the festival’s program book, the organizers call the “St. Matthew Passion” “one of Bach’s greatest musical achievements,” a work that is “intensely dramatic, deeply spiritual, and composed on a scale unlike his other major works, requiring two choruses, two orchestras, a children’s chorus, and five vocal soloists.”

“In 2027, the ‘St. Matthew Passion’ is going to be on the program of presenting and performing organizations all over the country,” said Bill Hite, a festival co-founder, co-producer, and UMass voice professor. “It’s going to be a bumper, banner year for the piece, and justifiably so. [Bach’s] output was stupendously large, and even within the context of his output, I think if you asked 10 professional musicians [and] composers, ‘Which is the piece of Bach’s that stands out for you?’ I think eight of them would say the ‘St. Matthew Passion.’”

Johann Sebastian Bach wrote more than 1,100 pieces of music, so there’s no shortage of material for the festival to draw from, but what gives him his staying power?

“His music has this ability to really touch humanity and what it means to be human, despite it [being] religiously oriented,” Stenroos said. “I think it’s a great art form, and giving the opportunity to be closer to that is really special for the college.”

“He is the embodiment of the timeless master who has influenced people in every direction across genres, and I think that nobody really disagrees that he was possibly the most consequential influence on western music and then also global music in his time,” Chang said.

“I hope that some people might see some advertising for Bach Fest in some capacity, and I hope they’re curious to discover more what it’s all about,” Stenroos added. “Yes, it’s this guy who was alive 300 years ago – ‘Why are we still talking about that? How is that still relevant?’ I hope that some people will go out on a limb to see what it’s all about.”

Tickets to the Symposium are $25 general admission or $5 for students. Tickets to the headline concerts on Saturday and Sunday are $25 general admission, $20 for seniors, and free for students with ID or children under 18. To buy tickets or see a full schedule of the festival’s events, visit websites.umass.edu/bach.

Carolyn Brown can be reached at cbrown@gazettenet.com.