Tanglewood Learning Institute, Berkshire Bach Society Celebrate Bach's Birthday
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GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass. — Tanglewood Learning Institute (TLI) in collaboration with the Berkshire Bach Society (BBS) announced "BBS Portals: In the Key of Bach," on March 21, 2026, 3pm, at the Linde Center for Music and Learning in Lenox/Stockbridge.
The program celebrates Bach's 341st birthday with a live performance by Artistic Director and violinist Eugene Drucker, a screening of the film In the Key of Bach by filmmaker Michael Lawrence, a post-screening conversation hosted by Eugene Drucker, and a surprise at the end of the event.
The presentation is part of a new collaboration between TLI and BBS that showcases Berkshire Bach's BBS Portals, a series exploring creativity and the influence J.S. Bach has had on artists across disciplines.
To date BBS Portals has featured films by Michael Walker, Tristan Cook (creator of the just-released documentary on the Emerson String Quartet), and choreographer Peter Sparling (principal male dancer for Martha Graham and originator of the screen dance genre), as well as important musicologists, authors, and popular speakers. In November 2025 TLI hosted a BBS Portals screening of the film Bach & Friends, Michael Walker's 2010 film that featured various luminaries of the music world. The film was introduced with a live performance by two of the musicians in the film—BBS Artistic Director Eugene Drucker, violin, and Simone Dinnerstein, piano—and the event concluded with a lively conversation among Drucker, Dinnerstein, and the audience.
"I'm sure Bach never imagined that his life and music would continue to be celebrated more than three centuries after he died or that we would prize his works for their complexity, stylistic perfection, and profound expressivity," said Terrill McDade, Executive Director of the Berkshire Bach Society, "but that's exactly what we're doing in 2026 for an artist who strides among us as a colossus. His catalogue of work is still fresh and still stuns in its ability to move us and whisper to our innermost soul. Entertaining, satisfying, and meaningful. Bach worked in relative obscurity three hundred years ago, and it's taken the rest of us a little time to catch up. Our birthday event is an opportunity to celebrate his genius, to learn a little, and to have some fun while doing it."
To open the March 21st program, Artistic Director Eugene Drucker plays excerpts from Bach's Partita No. 1 in B minor for solo violin, BWV 1002. Michael Lawrence's biopic, In the Key of Bach, follows and gives context to the music. Lawrence is an Emmy Award-winning film director and writer based in Manhattan who is affiliated with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and The Cleveland Orchestra and has produced and directed several documentaries about musicians and composers including Bach, Wagner, Mahler, and others. Following the screening, Eugene Drucker hosts a conversation with the audience and invites everyone to salute the birthday boy and share some Geburtstagskuchen.
Join Berkshire Bach and the Tanglewood Learning Institute for In the Key of Bach at 3pm on Saturday, March 21, at the Linde Center for Music and Learning. Tickets at TLI.org: $45-$40 Berkshire Bach Members | Children and Students under 25 with valid ID are admitted free. The event is about two and a half hours long including an intermission.
