Koopman Bach Cantata 18

The cantatas of volume 20 combine the concluding items from the "Picander" year of 1728-29 with a series of cantatas from the first half of the 1730s. A special feature is the inclusion of a hitherto completely unknown sacred work from Bach’s Weimar period, discovered as recently as May 2005 by Michael Maul (who works in the Bach-Archiv in Leipzig) in the Herzogin Anna Amalia Library, Weimar. This aria of praise dating from 1713, preserved in a newly discovered original source and now assigned the BWV number 1127, supplements Bach’s Weimar cantatas in a felicitous manner. Above all it is the first new work to add to Bach’s vocal output for 70 years, since the discovery of the cantata fragment “Bekennen will ich seinen Namen”, BWV 200.

A selection of Bach's secular smaller-scale choral and vocal works in the Suzuki BIS cantata cycle delights as much as the weightier ones have done.
Masaaki Suzuki is nearing the end of the excellent BIS cycle of all the Bach cantatas. Other complete current cycles of note are those by Ton Koopman on Challenge and John Eliot Gardiner on SDG. This is the only one on SACD although the disks can also be played in stereo on CD players and most computers. It's also a cycle using period instruments; Koopman's and Gardiner's do not.

The cantatas in this volume all date from Johann Sebastian Bach's second year of office as Thomaskantor in Leipzig. The series of chorale cantatas, which breaks off in early 1725, forms an almost complete yearly cycle which derives an exceptional unity of style and content from its debt to established Lutheran hymnody. Almost all the cantatas contain the first and last verse of a hymn, the other verses being paraphrased in recitatives and arias. Practically any selection of the chorale cantatas will display the unusually rich variety of form and colour that is one of their most distinctive features.

Bach composed in Leipzig the biggest part of his cantatas. A cantata is a composition in several parts for one or more voices and instruments, where arias, recitatives and chorusses alternate. Often these were preceded by an instrumental introduction, a sinfonia. In Bach's earliest cantatas these were also called concerto, sonata or sonatina. These instrumental works are collected on this album.

One of the seemingly endless possibilities for programming Bach's cantatas, this 2008 Antoine Marchand disc drawn from Ton Koopman and the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra & Choir's survey of the complete surviving cantatas joins five works featuring either alto or tenor soloists. The first two works here feature Polish alto Bogna Bartosz, the third German alto Andreas Scholl, the fourth German tenor Christoph Prégardien, and the fifth – a single aria for an unspecified occasion – Bartosz again. As in all Koopman's Bach recordings, these are always entirely successful if not entirely predictable performances. Organist Koopman is a canny Bach conductor, leading performances from the keyboard that combines both the spirituality and humanity of Bach's music.

The fifth volume of our complete recording of Bach’s cantatas completes the series of secular cantatas from the composer’s years in Leipzig. Seven works are involved here, spanning a period from 1725 to 1742, the year of Bach’s final secular cantata, BWV 212. Of Bach’s occasional compositions, some fifty secular pieces have survived, yet these represent no more than a fraction of what must once have existed. Indeed, there is no other group of works by the composer that has suffered such great – and regrettable – losses. In the case of more than half of the works that are known to have existed, only the words, but not the music, survived. Quite how many pieces may have disappeared without leaving any trace whatsoever is impossible to say.

In the autumn of 1713, Bach was invited to apply for the post of organist and music director at the Marktkirche in Halle in succession to Handel's teacher, Friedrich Wilhelm Zachow. Bach was honoured to accept the invitation and in doing so made it clear that he was keen to extend his activities. Under Zachow, who had created a respectable repertory of sacred works of the most varied genres, including a large number of church cantatas, music in Halle had flourished and reached a level that offered Bach an area of responsibility that he evidently found attractive.

The ninth volume of this complete recording of Bach’s cantatas continues the series of cantatas from the first Leipzig cycle. Cantata 173a is the sole exception: a secular cantata composed by Bach at Cöthen, it was reworked as a church cantata (BWV 173) for the first Leipzig cycle and is included in Volume 7 (CD 3). BWV 66 is also based on an original work from Bach’s Cöthen period.

This twenty-second and last volume of cantata recordings contains two of Bach's latest cantatas (BWV 30 and 80), including the secular model for BWV 30 and Wilhelm Friedemann Bach's arrangement of two movements from BWV 80 dating from after 1750. Also included are the four Kyrie-Gloria masses of the late 1730s; they are very closely associated with the cantata repertoire of the 1720s. These masses are based on selected movements of cantatas dating from the period 1723-6; after an interval of ten or so years Bach reworked them, in most cases very thoroughly. Renowned Bach specialist Ton Koopman (1944) was awarded the 2006 Bach Medal by the city of Leipzig 05 Jun 2006, the final day of this year's annual Leipzig Bach Festival.

The fourth volume of our complete recording of Bach's cantatas completes the series of secular cantatas from the composer's years in Leipzig. Seven works are involved here, spanning a period from 1725 to1742, the year of Bach's final secular cantata, BWV 212. Of Bach's occasional compositions, some fifty secular pieces have survived, yet these represent no more than a fraction of what must once have existed. Bach's secular cantatas cover a period of almost exactly three decades.