Calvin Bowman’s 16-hour Bach endurance test comes to Brisbane
The Australian organist will perform about 150 of Johann Sebastian Bach’s organ works in a free Brisbane Festival concert at QPAC.
Australian organist and composer Calvin Bowman is scheduled to begin a 16-hour performance of Johann Sebastian Bach’s organ music at 6am on Sunday, at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre as part of Brisbane Festival.
The free concert will encompass Bach’s complete catalogue of about 150 organ works, performed consecutively. Bowman intends to open with the composer’s six trio sonatas and close with the Orgelbüchlein, a collection of short chorale preludes.
The undertaking will include brief breaks, with a masseur assisting Bowman from the afternoon onwards. He has attempted the same performance twice before, at Melbourne Festival in 2009 and Mona Foma in Launceston in 2022. The earlier Melbourne performance reportedly took about a week to recover from.
Bowman has played the organ since high school and was the first Australian awarded a doctor of musical arts from Yale University. The QPAC instrument, built in the 1980s, differs substantially from the organs Bach played, but offers a wide range of sounds, from delicate flutes to the full force of the organo pleno.
Audiences can attend for as much or as little of the performance as they choose. The Guardian reported that Bowman views Bach’s music as a meeting point of intellect, emotion and spirit, with the final work’s quiet meditation on life’s brevity bringing the marathon to a subdued close.
