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Bach Cantatas: Advent to Christmas

Bach Weekend with the Monteverdi Choir

,Barbican Hall
Portrait of Sir John Eliot Gardiner

John Eliot Gardiner and the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists launch a weekend-long celebration of Johann Sebastian Bach.

Few conductors and few ensembles have identified more closely with Bach’s cantatas than John Eliot Gardiner and his Monteverdi Choir, along with English Baroque Soloists. They begin a weekend-long celebration of this endlessly rich music with four works that show Bach’s genius at its most dramatic – and inexhaustible.

Bach, says Gardiner, ‘can make a scene as vivid as anything in an opera’. In this emotionally-charged first of seven all-Bach concerts, he focuses on music that sets light against darkness, pain against joy. These performers’ recorded cycle of the Bach cantatas, wrote The Observer, ‘ranks as one of the musical events of the decade’.

Tagged with: Classical music Barbican Presents 2017–18 Bach Weekend More...

Programme

JS Bach ‘Wachet! betet! betet! wachet!’ BWV 70
Jacobus Gallus Jerusalem gaude gaudio
JS Bach ‘Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland’ BWV 61
JS Bach ‘Jesus schläft, was sol lich hoffen?’ BWV 81
Schütz ‘Ach, Herr, du Schöpfer aller Ding’ SWV 450
JS Bach ‘Unser Mund sei voll Lachens’ BWV 110

Performers

Monteverdi Choir
Sir John Eliot Gardiner conductor
English Baroque Soloists
Hana Blazikova soprano
Julia Doyle soprano
Reginald Mobley alto
Hugo Hymas tenor
Peter Harvey bass

Download the programme

Discover

people in a church

Watch: short extract from Bach Cantata Pilgrimage

 

Sir John Eliot Gardiner conducts the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists in this short extract filmed during the Bach Cantata Pilgrimage at St David's Cathedral, Pembrokeshire, Wales.

photo of john eliot gardiner

Watch: John Eliot Gardiner - celebrating the Universal Bach

 

John Eliot Gardiner talks Bach and his relationship to music.

Barbican Hall