Bach in Bethlehem

Last winter when Death took John Frederick Wolle, musical folk felt as though the passing of a great conductor meant the passing of a great institution. John Frederick Wolle founded the Bach Festivals in Bethlehem, Pa., kept them as potently alive as the steel industry which grew to spread its commercial smoke over practically everything else in Bethlehem. Farmers and later factory workers came to share "Mr. Fred's'' love for the music of Bach, for the great B Minor Mass whose choruses they learned to sing like professionals.

Last week, despite the gloomy predictions, the Moravian Trombone Choir climbed to the belfry of Lehigh University's Packer Memorial Chapel, announced the beginning of another Bach Festival. Bach enthusiasts had come from Vermont, Georgia, New York, Minneapolis. Again 240 Bethlehem natives reverently intoned the Mass's pleading Kyrie, the deeply moving Crucifixus, the climactic Et Resurrexit.

Bethlehem this spring entrusted its festival to the leadership of Bruce Anderson Carey, a bespectacled, broad-shouldered Canadian of 57 who teaches at Girard College in Philadelphia, trains and conducts the Mendelssohn Glee Club so well that Conductor Leopold Stokowski frequently engages it to sing difficult choral works with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Like blond-mopped Stokowski, Bruce Carey conducted last week without a baton, bringing out the Mass's mighty effects with direct, compelling gestures of his two bare hands. During intermission Festival directors met to discuss ways & means of perpetuating Fred Wolle's idea, to keep Bethlehem the U. S. headquarters for Bach. So satisfied were they all with the performance of Conductor Carey that they engaged him to be Wolle's permanent successor.

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