Happy New Year Everyone!
Come and join us for our first Bach Vespers of 2025, at 6.30pm on 26 January, at the church of St Mary-at-Hill in the City of London. We’ll be performing BWV 73, Herr, wie du willt so schick’s mit mir. This is one of Bach’s most original cantatas. Written in 1729 for the third Sunday after Epiphany, it presents the theme of faith, trust and calm acceptance in the face of death.
It opens with an emotionally turbulent chorus followed by a soothing tenor aria with beautiful oboe obbligato. The striking bass aria is based on a motif from Stölzel’s famous ‘Bist du bei mir’, which appears in Bach’s wife Anna Magdalena’s Notenbüchlein. This movement is full of word painting, including funeral bells depicted by pizzicato strings. The melody of the final chorale comes from a secular sixteenth-century French pop-song, ‘Une jeune fillette’. Combined here with Bach’s harmonies and more serious words, it provides a fittingly uplifting end to the cantata. The service will include other German baroque music, performed by our team of singers and period instrumentalists.
Everyone is welcome (you don’t have to be religious), and attendance is free. Do come along and bring your friends. We look forward to seeing you there to share Bach’s wonderful music!
Following Bach Vespers: 23 February (BWV 92).
Wishing all our friends and followers a very happy Christmas!
We’ll be performing a beautiful cantata at Bach Vespers on 24 November, at the church of St Mary-at-Hill in the City of London, at 6.30pm. Bach’s stunning BWV 61, Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland, looks ahead to Advent and the start of the new liturgical year. This joyful cantata is one of Bach’s earliest, dating from 1714, when he was working in Weimar, although he revived it during his first year in Leipzig. The opening movement, in striking French overture style, is based on Martin Luther’s Advent hymn (pictured), itself based on a medieval chant melody. Other notable moments in the cantata include a tenor aria in the form of a foot-tapping gigue, and the movingly poignant soprano aria ‘Öffne dich, mein ganzes Herze’, which you can hear in a clip from BBC Radio 4 on the right-hand side of this page. The service will also include other music by Bach’s contemporaries, performed by our team of singers and period instrumentalists.
…not even a power outage! We had a fantastic Bach Vespers this evening, despite the fact that a power cut in the church threatened to spoil everything. Bach didn’t have electricity and it didn’t cramp his style, so we rose to the challenge and continued undaunted. No organ, no problem – we changed to a harpsichord instead. No heating? That’s what coats are for. No light? Torches and clip-on lights did the trick (safer than candles). The picture shows our wonderful team of singers rehearsing in the dark. It was interesting making music without being able to see our colleagues. The sheer relief when the power came back in time for the service added an extra celebratory touch to our performance of Bach’s amazing BWV 80 to a full house on this Reformation Sunday. This will be a Bach Vespers to remember!
Don’t miss us on 27 October as we perform Bach’s magnificent and ever popular Reformation cantata, BWV 80, Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott. This Bach Vespers service takes place at 6.30pm at the church of St Mary at Hill in the City of London, hosted by St Anne’s Lutheran Church. This cantata features a team of three oboes of different sizes and bassoon, playing with and in contrast to the strings to create fabulous textural colours. There will also be lots of other music too, performed on period instruments.