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June 9, 2025 – Following its expansion to a full week of musical events during the summer of 2024, the Five Cities Baroque Festival will return for its third season from June 15th to 21st, 2025, with events in Champaign, Decatur, and Springfield. The Festival will once again draw together the best Baroque musicians from across the state of Illinois, as well as guest artists from afar, to deliver a slate of seven events in seven days, all of which will be free and open to the public.
The Festival will open with a program of Bach cantatas performed during Mass at the Chapel of St. John the Divine in Champaign on Sunday morning, June 15th. The next night, five of the region’s finest Baroque musicians will deliver a concert of chamber music at the Church of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross in Champaign. The Festival will then shift to Decatur on Tuesday, June 17th, with the first-ever Five Cities Baroque Young Artist recital. This event will spotlight the organization’s quartet of young professional singers at Decatur First United Methodist Church. On Wednesday night, June 18th, this year’s Artists in Residence, Filigree Ensemble, will give a recital of their own at St. John’s Episcopal Church of Decatur, accompanied by Jeffrey Noonan.
On Thursday night, June 19th, the Millikin Faculty Jazz Quintet will present a program based on Bach’s cantata Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme. This program, in honor of Juneteenth, will take place at St. Peter’s African Methodist Episcopal Church of Decatur and will be preceded by an introductory lecture from Five Cities Baroque Board Member William McClain. On Friday night, the students of the Five Cities
Baroque Youth Academy will showcase the work they will do all week in a recital on campus at Millikin University, joined by Filigree Ensemble. The Third Five Cities Baroque Festival will then close on Saturday night, June 21st, at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Springfield, with a performance of Marianna Martines’s Dixit Dominus and W.A. Mozart’s Davide Penitente.
Admission to all events is free; donations will be accepted at the door. The Festival is open to the public through the generous support of the Caterpillar Foundation, the Decatur Area Arts Council, Decatur First United Methodist Church, the Erwin and Linda Arends Foundation, the Illinois Arts Council, Millikin University, St. John’s Episcopal Church of Decatur, the Symphony Orchestra Guild of Decatur, and numerous individual sponsors.