conductor
Professor of Music Emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh, Don Franklin, scholar and performer of Bach’s music, is Past President of the American Bach Society and has taught as a Guest Professor at Indiana University in Bloomington and the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin. He is founder and and music director of Bach and the Baroque, a Pittsburgh-based ensemble and concert series that focused on historically informed performances of the music of J.S. Bach and his contemporaries. Between 1991 and 2007, he conducted over 40 works by J.S. Bach, including 30 cantatas, the St. Matthew Passion, the Christmas Oratorio, the Lutheran masses and motets and the 1733 Missa. In addition, he conducted modern day premieres of C. P. E Bach’s 1789 St. Matthew Passion, Georg Philipp Telemann’s 1750 St. Matthew Passion, and Antonio Bertali’s Missa Novi Regis. In addition to works on the Bach and Baroque series, he has conducted seventeenth- and eighteenth-century operas by Cavalli, Purcell, Handel, Mozart and Cimarosa. Along with editing Bach Studies (CUP press) and serving as a founding editor of Bach Perspectives, he has contributed essays to several collected volumes of essays, many of which reflect an interest in the notational and performance practice issues that inform his work as a performer.