About the Bach Vespers Services
Throughout his career, but especially during his years as the Cantor of the St Thomas Church in Leipzig for the last 27 years of his life, Johann Sebastian Bach wrote church cantatas. These are works for choir, soloists and orchestra, usually about 20 to 25 minutes in length, that were designed to provide musical commentary on the scripture readings for the day on which they were performed. Perhaps a dozen of Bach’s cantatas are well known as concert repertoire, such as Cantata 140, “Wachet auf”; Cantata 4, “Christ lag in Todesbanden”; and Cantata 80, “Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott”. But Bach wrote approximately 300 church cantatas, of which nearly 200 survive. Most are masterpieces, but largely unknown to concert audiences.
Because Bach’s church cantatas were intended for the liturgy and not the concert hall, they only come fully alive within a liturgical context. The Bach Vespers format provides enough of a liturgical context for Bach’s cantatas to speak as they were meant to do. The two readings to which the cantata responds are read, and two or three congregational hymns–often Lutheran chorales with which Bach would have been familiar–are sung. The Ensemble usually also performs a motet or other choral piece along with the cantata.
Bach Vespers allow us to hear and appreciate this largely unexplored and varied repertoire, which includes some of Bach’s finest compositional work, in a fresh “new” way, close to they way Bach meant them to be heard.