Auge Gottes

This is the second CD in the first complete recording of the 72 cantatas from Georg Philipp Telemann’s collection Harmonischer Gottes-Dienst, published in Hamburg in 1726 – the first complete set of cantatas for the liturgical year to be published. The cantatas are designated for voice, an obbligato instrument (violin on this disc) and basso continuo, and take the form of two da capo arias with an intervening recitative. Although intended for worship, both public and private, Telemann’s cantatas are a masterly blend of tunefulness with skilled counterpoint and vocal and instrumental virtuosity.

Throughout most of his professional life, Johann Sebastian Bach composed cantatas for use at church services: it is thought that he probably wrote at least 300 such works. Some 200 of these are still extant, of which the earliest hail from Bach's time as organist in Arnstadt (1703-07) and the last were composed only a year or two before his death in 1750. In 1995, when Masaaki Suzuki and his Bach Collegium Japan began the monumental journey of recording the cantatas, they decided to follow in Bach's footsteps.

The composer (Johann Gottfried) Carl Loewe is familiar to music lovers of the 20th and 21st centuries above all as the writer of important ballad scores, of which Edward, Erlkonig, Herr Oluf, and Archibald Douglas are well-known examples. His songs Die Uhr or Heinrich der Vogler were or are popular hits, especially in a bygone heyday of salon music and educated bourgeois culture. Loewe wrote more than 400 songs. But the same Carl Loewe also write six operas, two symphonies and two piano concertos as well as a total of 17 sacred and secular oratorios, all of which have fallen into oblivion. With the present oratorio, the Arcix Vocalisten, led by Thomas Gropper, are vehemently opposed to oblivion.

Like its two predecessors, the eighth volume of our complete recording of Bach's cantatas is devoted to the first annual cyle of Leipzig cantatas of 1723/24. In planning and implementing this cycle, Bach took upon himself a burden of work far in excess of anything he had earlier assumed — to say nothing of the creative and artistic challenges involved. Whereas his Weimar cantatas of 1714-16 had been written at regular monthly intervals, he now had four times as much work on his hands. In the circumstances, it is entirely understandable that, whenever possible, he fell back on existing works, especially those written in Weimar, although pieces composed were no less liable to be pillaged. These self-borrowings notwithstanding, the main emphasis none the less lay on the composition of new works, and the first cycle of cantatas that Bach wrote for Leipzig is notable for the number of new pieces that it contains.

World premiere recordings of the Magnificat as well as the festive music Die Himmel erzahlen die Ehre Gottes by C. P. E. Bach. A rousing and convincing interpretation by the Basel Madrigalists, L'arpa festante and renowned soloists under the direction of Fritz Naf. Throughout his life, C. P. E. Bach esteemed his Magnificat as one of his most important works. Here it is presented in the rarely heard early Leipzig version from 1749, with which the son wanted to recommend himself as a potential successor to his father in the office of Kantor at St. Thomas's Church. It fulfils all the criteria that the aesthetics of the time demanded of a large-scale sacred composition: grandeur, dignity, polyphonic and concertante choral movements, sensitive and pathetic arias, and a grand concluding double fugue.

Carl Philipp Emanuel was the most famous son of the great Johann Sebastian. He developed his own musical language, the Empfindsamer Stil, of which the expression of personal feelings, a free and sometimes improvisatory style and the frequent alternation of opposing moods and characters were the keywords. His music can be both charming and vehement, may please or shock the listener, can be simple of complicated: a perfect example of the Sturm und Drang movement of his period.