Join us ! BLEMF 2025 offers a weeklong series of concerts & discussions, educational workshops for kids & adults, our 2nd annual BLEMF Community Showcase & New Neighbors Children’s Art Exhibit, and more. Both live & online. Explore our program & mark your calendars!

Schedule:

Youth Performance

5:00pm - Live Concert

The BEMI Players

The 3rd Annual Stanley Ritchie Youth Performance

(Bloomington, IN) This third appearance on the BLEMF mainstage by members of the Bloomington Early Music Immersion program showcases new skills and newly discovered talents developed during a week of instruction and activities introducing middle-school aged musicians to Baroque era technique and repertoire. A partnership between Bloomington Early Music and the Historical Performance Institute of the Jacobs School of Music, the 2025 BEMI program is once again free to participants and fun for all!

First Christian Church
205 E. Kirkwood Avenue
(corner of Kirkwood & Washington)

Closing Night!

7:00pm - Live Concert

6:15pm - Pre-Concert Discussion

Anastasia Chin, Sylvester Makobi & Carmen Johnson-PÁjaro

Sancho & Bridgetower: Black British Musicians from Different Worlds  

(Bloomington, IN & New York, NY) Our closing night concert brings to the stage the music of two British men whose distinctive careers spanned nearly the entire 18th century. Renowned in their own time for their exceptional musical skills and celebrated today as central figures in classical music’s recovery of its Black history, the two landed in England from as far apart as 18th century Black men could come. Born on a Portuguese slave ship bound for New Granada (present day Colombia), Charles Ignatius Sancho (c.1725-1760) was brought to England as a child slave, gifted to three sisters from whom he later escaped. Sancho found work as a valet to a Duke, taught himself to read and write in the Duke’s grand library, and grew into a well-known, widely published abolitionist, author, and composer. George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower (1758-1799) was born in Galicia (present day Poland) to an Austro-German woman and a freedman from the West Indies who served as a page to Prince Esterhazy. Bridgetower first entered the country as a child prodigy whose musical talent earned him the attention and lifelong support of none less than the King of England, George IV. Rising stars on the national and international early music stages, Anastasia Chin (keyboards),  Sylvester Makobi (tenor), and Carmen Johnson-Pájaro (baroque violin), breathe life into the music of Sancho and Bridgetower, and conclude our festival with a performance of  Beethoven’s Ninth Sonata for Violin & Piano–the devilishly difficult Kreutzer Sonata composed for and originally dedicated to the virtuosic Bridgetower.

Pre-Concert Discussion led by Anastasia Chin, with members of the ensemble

First Christian Church
205 E. Kirkwood Avenue
(corner of Kirkwood & Washington)