We are very happy to have been invited back to perform the music for the St. Anne’s Lutheran Church Bach Vespers services in 2017. This is the 500th anniversary year of the Reformation (about which one can read much more on this dedicated page) and we are looking forward to contributing to the unique and special occasion that will be each and every event in association with St. Anne’s throughout the year.

The first of our Bach Vespers is on Sunday 29 January, as ever, at 6.30pm. We will perform cantata BWV 72, Alles nur nach Gottes Willen, whose central alto recitative reflects the iterated Beatitudes of the sermon on the mount, from which many Epiphany Gospel readings are drawn.

We hope that you can join us for this  performance, which includes other contemporaneous German baroque music. And don’t forget that we are also performing cantata BWV 140, Wachet auf, on 8 Jan at the Dutch Church in the City.

We’re really looking forward to starting 2017 in style with a performance of Bach’s much loved Christmastime cantata ‘Wachet auf’ BWV 140 at the Dutch Church in the heart of the City. The event features organ music by Bach on the wonderful Dutch Church organ performed by the organist David Titterington, and the former MP Jonathan Aitken gives a talk just prior to our cantata performance.

The event, at 3pm on Sunday 8 January 2017 is free to attend (there’s a collection to which you can contribute) and lasts around an hour. More via the Dutch Church website at dutchchurch.org.uk.

It’s a fortnight before Christmas. Tonight offered some really choice music and performers: in a quiet corner of just beyond London Bridge, Musica Poetica brought friends and backers together to launch new projects for 2017; meanwhile Oxford Baroque returned to Kings Place hanging Baroque baubles on the twin trees of a Kuhnau cantata and J. S. Bach’s Magnificat BWV 243a. There was just about time to hear performances in a half of each.

Musica Poetica is a chamber quintet with ambitious plans to perform and record all the vocal works of Franz Tunder in 2017. We heard a pair of the composer’s vocal pieces rich with drama and colour which promise good fun from the series of concerts the group have planned. The project formed the material basis for a formal, vanilla-and-lime-liveried launch for the group in the Porterhouse Café – a less incongruent environment than it might seem, as one of the stock programmes Musica Poetica will offer is designed to be performed informally alongside good food and wine.

Then a short trip up the Northern Line to King’s Place for an increasingly familiar visit from Oxford Baroque. Director David Lee had concocted the richest Christmas cake of a programme, climaxing with the J. S. Bach Magnificat BWV 243a, the initial version, complete with interpolated text settings from the German folk tradition, opening up the familiar verses of the Marian canticle. Some fine singing and classy continuo (David Gerrard & Kathleen Ross) essayed this much-loved work, with Jeremy Summerly conducting a measured performance which teased out every beam of the piece’s architecture.

This past weekend a few of us went to join our old friend and colleague Martin Knizia in the Berlin suburb of Altglienicke, where he his Kantor of the Pfarrkirche. Martin had decided to put on a performance of one of his favourite pieces, Schütz’s Musicalische Exequien, as part of a service to mark Totensonntag (death Sunday, i.e. the conclusion of the church year, prior to Advent Sunday).

Martin directed the parish choir he has inherited in his new position, and we sang the ripieno/soloisten parts of the work, as well as the motet Selig sind die Toten, with other colleagues from the RIAS-Kammerchor. The performance and service was well-received and we look forward to the opportunity to return for similar collaborative events in future.

This is a special, unique week for those of us who perform music with close associations to the Lutheran Church. It’s the 70th anniversary of the foundation of the London Bach Society today and then the 40th anniversary of Peter Lea-Cox’s City Bach Cantata Series on Friday. It is also the 499th anniversary year of the Reformation, the unofficial start of celebrations commemorating the quincentennial of the Lutheran Church in October 2017.

With all this in mind I popped by arguably the most significant Lutheran chapel in London, St. George’s Lutheran Chapel in Alie St., Aldgate, to have a look around.

There’s more history of St. George’s (est. 1762-63) here. The chapel is still used for special events, including organ recitals on the first Thursday of every month on the historic Walcher organ (1886). Here’s a video that that church has put together as a guide.