J.S. Bach: Herr, der du stark und mächtig bist BWV 10 / Die Himmel erzählen die Ehre Gottes BWV 76 / Sinfonia BWV 21 / Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis in meinem Herzen BWV 21
John Eliot Gardiner's multi award-winning label SDG begins 2010 with volume 2 in its Bach Cantata series, featuring Cantatas for the second and third Sunday after Trinity, recorded live in July 2000.
Performing to an audience of more than 1200, we join Gardiner, The Monteverdi Choir and The English Baroque Soloists at the halfway point of their Bach Cantata pilgrimage for a concert in one of the great architectural landmarks of Catholic Europe, the Basilisque Saint-Denis (Basilica Cathedral of Saint Denis).
Featuring internationally acclaimed soloists including James Gilchrist, Lisa Larsson, Daniel Taylor and Stephen Varcoe, the programme opens with BWV 2 Ach Gott, vom Himmel sieh darein (Oh God, look down from Heaven), a chorale cantata based upon Martin Luther's German hymn adaptation of Psalm 12. The psalm describes how easily man is led astray by heresy and Bach deals with such grim subject matter by resorting to composing in an archaic motet style. The result is austere beauty and has the engrossing quality of ritualised worship.
There then follows BWV 10 Meine Sell erhebt den Herren (My soul doth magnify the Lord), the fifth work in Bach's second Leipzig cantata cycle and set to the text of the German Magnificat. The chorale is predominantly joyful therefore and this is beautifully exemplified in the grand, rousing chorus that opens the first movement.
Schütz's superb motet Die Himmel erzählen die Ehre Gottes (The heavens are telling of God in glory) follows. Published in 1648 and dedicated to the choir of St Thomas in Leipzig, this is a motet that John Eliot remembers fondly, since it is a work he has known since he was six and he can still hear his father's ringing tenor declaiming its powerful text.
The concert ends with Bach's prodigious cantata, BWV 76 Die Himmel erzählen die Ehre Gottes, a lengthy and complex bipartite cantata, comprising fourteen movements and divided into two equal parts.
We then head to Zürich to hear John Eliot and his Monteverdi forces perform within the stunning Fraumünster Kirche, distinctive for its slender, blue spire.
They open with the two-part Weimar Cantata BWV 21 Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis (I had much affliction), considered to be '...one of the most extraordinary and inspired of Bach's vocal works', as stated by John Eliot Gardiner in his booklet note. There then follows BWV 135 Ach Herr, mich armen Sünder (O, Lord, I poor sinner). This is superb music and Bach concludes with a rousing 'Glory to God', to the Passion chorale by Cyriakus Schneegaß (1597).
With only two cantatas for this Sunday in existence, the concert ends with Bach's so-called Triple Concerto, BWV 1044 (Concerto for flute, violin and harpsichord). Despite its similarity to Brandenburg Concerto No.5, it seems to inhabit a different stylistic milieu to that of Bach's other concerti - one much close to that of his eldest sons.
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Price: $48.98