On July 24 we are going to perform Bach cantata BWV 105 and the opening Sinfonia of cantata BWV 169 – in effect, an organ concerto movement – for Bach Vespers. This is a special Bach Vespers as it comes within the 21st St. Anne’s International Bach Festival, the festival of Bach’s music run throughout July by Music at Hill. We’re delighted to welcome Sweelinck Ensemble director Martin Knizia back to play at this event as organ soloist.

The gospel reading on which the cantata loosely reflects concerns the parable of the Unjust Steward, a broker who manipulates his master’s debts to save his job.  Stephen Melton’s 1997 sculpture ‘LIFFE Trader’ (the image above, currently on show at the Guildhall Art Gallery) illustrates the equivocation of this story through the romanticism of mid 1980s to mid 1990s  ‘Open Outcry’ floor traders.

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We are very pleased that once again St. Anne’s Lutheran Church have invited us to perform the music at Bach Vespers on 19 June. This Sunday is the fourth after Trinity for which Bach wrote the cantata ‘Ich ruf zu dir, Herr jesu Christ’, BWV 177, in Leipzig in 1732.

At the centre of the cantata is the chorale melody of the title. This is piece of music made famous in modern cinema. Bach’s own chorale prelude BWV 639 was used by Andrei Tarkovsky in his 1972 masterpiece Solaris (featuring the use of Peter Breugel the Elder’s Hunters in the Snow, below) and Michael Haneke used a piano transcription of the same for his 2012 Palme d’Or-winning film Amour.

We will perform the chorale prelude at this service. In addition we’ll perform music by Andreas Raselius, Heinrich Schütz, Franz Tunder and Michael Nicolai. We are delighted to hear that the Bishop of the Lutheran Church in Great Britain, the Rt. Rev’d Dr. Martin Lind will preach at this service.

This service of Lutheran Vespers is free to attend at St. Mary-at-hill, Lovat Lane, EC3R 8EE at 6.30pm. More on what happens at the service here.

Teldec’s original packaging with J.J. Ihle’s portrait of Bach

News of the death of Austrian conductor and period performance pioneer Nikolaus Harnoncourt is a chill wind to those of us involved with the City Bach Collective.

Harnoncourt was a leading figure in the period performance movement, setting up Concentus Musicus Wien in 1953. Moreover, in 1971 he, with his colleague Gustav Leonhardt (who died in 2012) and their respective groups, undertook to record all J.S. Bach’s church cantatas for the Teldec label. This they achieved in 1990, the first complete period-instrument survey. You can listen to them all via this YouTube playlist. (Our concerts of Bach cantatas in the City and subsequent performance of Bach’s cantatas in Lutheran Vespers – the Bach Vespers series – ran for a similar period in the slipstream of this, from 1976 to the first cycle completion in 1997.)

The familiar brown covers of the records of this series have been a constant companion for those of us who have taken an interest in Bach’s cantatas in any depth. With considerable scholarship and an uncompromising pursuit of something truly novel (using all male voices almost entirely throughout, including solo boy trebles) the music-making captured can occasionally sound rather exotic. In a lengthy review for the NY Times from 1991, the American musicologist Richard Taruskin makes a case for this being the true intent of Harnoncourt and, to a lesser extent, Leonhardt – to reveal the Boschian nightmare of Luther’s vision of hell-on-earth through music not only of great beauty but also impossible cacophony.

While this extreme view has little traction here, Harnoncourt’s forcing wide the envelope of possibility has allowed our imaginations to run free in trying this great wealth of music for ourselves. The recordings came with a great deal of supplementary material, including sheet music, facilitating the diving-off point for proper investigation. Our tradition of performing the cantatas within the liturgy continues on 24 April with cantata BWV 166, ‘Wo gehest du hin?’. We will try to triangulate our love for performing this fine music with its inseparable liturgical purpose, remembering the living platform that Harnoncourt’s work in this and all music has provided.

We are very pleased that St. Anne’s Lutheran Church have invited us to return to perform the music at Bach Vespers on 24 April. This Sunday, the fourth after Easter, is Cantate Sunday, for which Bach wrote the cantata ‘Wo gehest du hin?’, BWV 166, in Leipzig in 1724.

We plan to perform various other works by Buxtehude and Schütz in addition at appropriate junctures during the service of Lutheran Vespers, including Schütz’s setting of the Creed from the Kleine Geistliche Konzerte SWV 303. (There’s a Facebook event listing here, as well as Bachtrack and Concert-Diary listings if you have a preferred window by which to view the event.)

The Rev. Andy Roland will preach a sermon prior to the cantata and the City Bach Collective will be directed by the leader Hazel Brooks. This service of Lutheran Vespers is free to attend at St. Mary-at-hill, Lovat Lane, EC3R 8EE at 6.30pm.