GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass. — The Berkshire Bach Society (BBS) concludes its 2025-2026 Harpsichord Festival with a solo recital by harpsichordist Peter Sykes on Oct. 25, 3pm, at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Stockbridge. 

 

"Berkshire Bach is delighted to present Peter Sykes in a program of French Baroque music for keyboard," said Terrill McDade, executive Director of BBS.  "The Baroque repertoire by French composers is extensive and dominated by the Couperin dynasty, just as the German tradition was dominated by the Bach family.  But there are numerous others, from Marin Marais to Elisabeth Jacquet to Jean-Henri d'Anglebert to Jean-Philippe Rameau.  Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France was the center of cultural Europe, and Peter Sykes has chosen a program that shows the beauty, elegance, and mystique of the music that was an integral part of court life—but completely different from music by composers on the other side of the Rhine.  His recital is a great opportunity to hear the difference."

 

Peter Sykes is principal instructor of harpsichord in the Historical Performance Department of the Juilliard School in New York City, a lecturer at Boston University, and one of the most distinguished and versatile keyboard performers active today.  He is familiar to BBS audiences for his masterful performances on the great Roosevelt Organ at the First Congregational Church in Great Barrington, but his first love was the harpsichord.  When he was 15, he and his father built an instrument from a Frank Hubbard harpsichord kit and he played it in performance for many years.  Over the course of his career, he has acquired several fine harpsichords and clavichords and performs for BBS on a two-manual instrument from his collection.  Peter Sykes last performed for Berkshire Bach in the period ensemble that accompanied tenor Nicholas Phan in his Bach 52 project at Tanglewood's Linde Center for Music and Learning.

 

Join BBS for a special recital of French Baroque music for keyboard by Peter Sykes on Saturday, Oct. 25, 2025, 3pm, at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Stockbridge.  For more information and to purchase tickets visit www.berkshirebach.org/events.