American Bach Soloists

The American Bach Soloists ("ABS") is an American baroque orchestra dedicated to preserving the heritage of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and his contemporaries through historically informed performances on period instruments. Founded in Belvedere, California in 1989 with the mission of introducing contemporary audiences to Bach's cantatas, co-founder and artistic director Jeffrey Thomas has since expanded the artistic direction of the ensemble to include Bach’s purely instrumental and larger choral masterpieces, as well as music of his contemporaries and that of the early Classical era. The ensemble's acclaimed chorus was renamed the American Bach Choir in 2006.

ABS presents an annual subscription series of concerts with performances in Belvedere, Berkeley, Davis, and San Francisco. Their annual holiday performances of Handel’s Messiah—presented in San Francisco's Grace Cathedral each December before capacity audiences since 1992—have become a Bay Area tradition. Since 2010, the ABS season has culminated with the annual American Bach Soloists Festival & Academy, a two-week summer Bach Festival held at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Concurrent with the Festival is the American Bach Soloists Academy, an advanced training program for emerging professionals and accomplished students of historically informed performance practice. In 2013, Jeffrey Thomas conducted the ABS Festival Orchestra in the first North American performance of Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber’s 53-part Missa Salisburgensis—the largest-scaled surviving work from the Baroque—with the composer's full forces and instrumentation. At the 2015 Festival, Thomas will conduct the first performances outside of Europe of Marin Marais' 1709 opera Sémélé.