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.

You are invited to to a party.

To mark the 40^th anniversary of the first Bach cantata concert, the City Bach Collective will perform cantatas BWV 61 & 62 at a lunchtime concert this Friday, 11 November. The concert will be hosted by the associated concert series Music-at-Hill at the church of St. Mary-at-Hill where the series began with Peter Lea-Cox taking his RAM students through BWV 38 on 11 November 1976. Admission is free with a retiring collection. It is also a great opportunity for those who don’t usually make it into the City at weekends to hear the City Bach Collective perform.

Event: City Bach Cantata Series 40^th Anniversary Concert
Date: Friday 11 November 2016 at 1.05pm
Venue: St. Mary-at-Hill Church, Lovat Lane, London EC3R 8EE
Programme: J. S. Bach cantatas BWV 61 & 62, ‘Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland’
Performers: The City Bach Collective, leader-director Hazel Brooks

There’s a history of the series and stories from those who were involved at the beginning in a specially produced programme that you can pick up at the concert: you can also read the programme ahead of the concert online, below:

In a week’s time we perform at the first of three Bach Vespers services for St. Anne’s Lutheran Church on the way to Christmas. On Sunday 25 September at 6.30pm we will give cantata BWV 96, ‘Herr Christ, der einge Gottessohn’. The Gospel text for the day recalls the episode in which Jesus is questioned by a lawyer about the law and counters by citing the first two commandments.

On 23 October at 6.30pm we will perform a colourful cantata for the final Reformation Sunday before next year’s Quincentennial. BWV 89, ‘Was soll ich aus dir machen, Ephraim?’ is a dramatic cantata coming straight from Matthew’s parable of the Unmerciful Servant, in which injustice, mercilessness and violence go hand in hand.

Then on 27 November again at 6.30pm we will perform one of the marvellously entertaining Advent cantatas, BWV 62, ‘Nun komm der Heiden Heiland’: ‘streite, siege, starker Held!’ babbles the bass, incontinent at the thought of imminent salvation.

We are able to perform these fine works of J.S. Bach’s through the generosity of Gibson Dunn in supporting St. Anne’s Bach Vespers series. If you want to know more about Bach Vespers with St. Anne’s Church, visit their web page here.