Oh, how I wish I could have been there in person, in July 2023! At the Schlosskirche (Palace Church) of the Ludwigsburg Palace in Germany, looking up at this ceiling painting by Carlo Carlone, and hearing Bach’s incredible cantatas 105 and 46 performed by the Gaechinger Cantorey under the direction of Hans-Christoph Rademann.
Alas, that summer I had other things on my mind, and was pretty late catching on to Rademann’s Vision Bach, a project to record all Bach’s cantatas from his first year in Leipzig (1723/1724), in the order in which Bach wrote them. So I missed most of those live concerts, but I managed to attend one in February 2024, went to this ensemble’s St. Matthew Passion in Hamburg in March 2025, and became a fan. This June, I had the great fortune to hear two of their performances at Bachfest Leipzig. There, everyone’s energy, but especially the quality of the orchestra blew me away. I was not alone in this, festival director Michael Maul complimented the orchestra too the next day during the talkshow he co-hosted.
Hans-Christoph Rademann, photo by Marco Borggreve
Rademann took over the Bach Akademie Stuttgart and the Gaechinger Cantorey from Helmut Rilling in 2013, and immediately replaced the orchestra with a period instrument ensemble. During the first three years, this happened through collaborations with Freiburger Barockorchester and Akademie Alte Musik Berlin. In 2016 Rademann founded the Bach Akademie Stuttgart’s own orchestra, also under the name Gaechinger Cantorey. And I feel you can tell that this orchestra is only 10 years young.
All 10 Volumes of Vision Bach are out now. Please scroll down on this website by Bachakademie Stuttgart to order directly from the publisher if you are in the European Union. Or visit this website, with links to order from Amazon if you are in the USA, and links for YouTube. I hope to discuss more of these Vision Bach recordings over the coming weeks and months.
For this Sunday, the 10th after Trinity, Bach wrote Cantata 46, Schauet doch und sehet, ob irgendein Schmerz sei in 1723. It appears on Vision Bach, Volume 3. You can purchase this on Amazon or Arkiv Music if you are in the USA, or on jpc if you are in Europe. Please consider purchasing, to support the artists! Also available on Spotify and YouTube.
Find the score here, and the German text with English translations here.
The recording of Cantata 46 features gorgeous singing by alto Elvira Bill and tenor Benedikt Kristjánsson, and the beautiful sound of Anneke Scott’s corno da tirarsi* in the opening chorus and closing chorale. But the absolute best is the bass aria.
Hannes Rux-BrachtendorfMatthias Winckhler
We all know Bach’s illustration of thunder and lightning from his St. Matthew Passion, but he does it very well too in this apocalyptic bass aria. And this performance by Baroque trumpet player Hannes Rux-Brachtendorf and bass Matthias Winckhler (yes, that’s really five consonants in a row in the middle of his last name) is unrivaled. Especially how together they illustrate the word “unerträglich” (unbearable) in the third line of the text, it is indeed almost unbearable, it is that good! I have never heard those harmonic crunches so well done on any other recording.
Dein Wetter zog sich auf von weiten, Doch dessen Strahl bricht endlich ein Und muss dir unerträglich sein, Da überhäufte Sünden Der Rache Blitz entzünden Und dir den Untergang bereiten.
Your tempest brewed from afar, Yet at long last its flash breaks forth And must be unbearable to you, As heaped-up sins Set aflame the lightning of vengeance And bring about your downfall.**
Hannes Rux-Brachtendorf plays with fabulous technique and gorgeous phrasing. His playing was impressive too during Bachfest Leipzig in Cantata 51 Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen. And Matthias Winckhler — ahhhhh, he has it all, the beautiful voice, the colors, the core in the sound. And he can do it all, sing all the notes, do the colloraturas, tell the story, AND move me. I’ll enjoy it while it lasts, because I observe a growing number of Lied and opera engagements on his calendar, so we might hear him less often in Bach cantatas.
Anneke Scott with corno da tirarasi* in the Palace church in Ludwigsburg – photo by Holger Schneider.
When listening to this Volume 3 of Vision Bach, don’t miss the cantata this album opens with: Cantata 105 Herr, gehe nicht ins Gericht mit deinem Knecht for the ninth Sunday after Trinity (last week). Find the text for that cantata here. The recording features gorgeous singing by the one and only Miriam Feuersinger in the soprano aria “Wie zittern und wanken;” a five star performance by horn player Anneke Scott (again on corno da tirarsi*) and tenor Benedikt Kristjánsson in “Kann ich nur Jesum mir zum Freunde machen;” and last but not least, Matthias Winckhler in the arioso “Wohl aber dem, der seinen Bürgen weiss.” This movement always makes me think of the “Am abend da es kühle war” arioso from Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, and it moves me to tears.
I want to tell a story and I want to touch everyone in the audience. People can hate it, and that’s okay, we can talk about it! But I don’t want it ever to happen that someone is leaving a concert of my group saying it didn’t move them in any way.
This is what CONTINUUM’s leader Elina Albach told me when I interviewed her in April 2022, and it still rings true today. For me, CONTINUUM’s Missa Miniatura was the most compelling concert at Bachfest Leipzig 2025, and an even stronger manifesto for peace than when I first heard it at the Bachkirche in Arnstadt in 2022.
Unless otherwise noted, all quotes in this article are from the interview I had with Elina Albach in April 2022 and have been edited for clarity.
What is Missa Miniatura?
CONTINUUM’s Missa Miniatura is a chamber-music version of Bach’s Mass in B Minor, arranged by Elina Albach for six singers and seven to eight instrumentalists. It is called “Miniatura” not just because it is performed by fewer people, but also because several movements have been cut from the original score. The Christe Eleison, the second Kyrie, the Gratias, the first three Credo movements, and the second Osanna are replaced by spoken texts, written specifically for this production by Swiss author Jürg Halter. In the music that remains, the vocal parts are almost the same as in the original composition.1 Of the instrumental parts, all original notes are played, but sometimes on completely different instruments than the original score asks for, and also divided differently over the various instrumentalists.
This new approach makes for an exciting, captivating, and thought-provoking concert experience. The spoken texts create a story arc in the piece, which, as an audience member, I often miss in performances of Bach’s Mass in B Minor.
Who is Elina Albach and what moved her to create an adaptation of Bach’s Mass in B Minor?
Elina Albach. Photo by Neda Navaee
Elina Albach is an award-winning harpsichordist, and the leader and founder of ensemble CONTINUUM, which has become known for its fresh and innovative approaches to Early Music performance. To the wider Bach audience, Elina Albach is probably best known as one of the creators of the Three-person St. John Passion, which received an OPUS Klassik award for the most innovative concert in 2019 and was broadcast live on Good Friday 2020 from an empty Thomaskirche in Leipzig.2
Regarding Bach’s Mass in B Minor, Elina foremost wanted to give the audience a chance to reflect on what “believing” means nowadays. This is the main reason she wanted contemporary spoken texts to replace the first three movements of the Credo, which contain the words “I believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things, seen and unseen. And in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God.”
She also strongly felt she wanted to reduce the length of the piece, for the practical reason that singing two hours in a row would be too demanding for such a small group of singers, and having an intermission is not an option for her:
“I prefer not having breaks in a concert. When one tries to build a story, a break just destroys everything. When I try to create a particular atmosphere, I really want to grab the audience’s hands and pull them into the concert.”
Selecting instrumentalists: “It is all about the people.”
What distinguishes Elina even more in the world of classical musicians is that she tends to form an ensemble based on the people she loves to share a stage with. Which exact instruments these people play is secondary. She explains this well in a preview video for Missa Miniatura on her YouTube channel:
“I look at which personalities would be a perfect fit for this project, even if they play an instrument that wasn’t planned. It is all about the actual person, with their individual background and abilities, their intellect, and their positive attitude —all the elements I require to realize this project.”
This year in Leipzig, this approach created such a compelling energy on stage, that I personally felt more than pulled into it: I wanted to curl up in the middle of it.
Orchestration
Of course, if you put together an ensemble this way, and still want all the notes from the original score to sound, it becomes quite a puzzle to figure out which instrument will play which notes. Elina admitted this process was much more complicated for the Mass in B Minor than for the St. John Passion. But thanks to a six day retreat with all instrumentalists where they tried out several different options, she solved the puzzle beautifully.
Hearing different instruments in the arias and choruses than the ones I’m used to kept me alert as a listener and made the music more transparent. The most striking change was the extreme percussiveness of the “Crucifixus,” which was played on electric guitar, violin, viola da gamba, cello, and harpsichord, with some of the string players playing col legno (with the wooden part of the bow hitting the strings). I felt it illustrated the crucifixion much better than Bach’s original orchestration.
Electric guitar? Yes! Keep reading to find out more about Bertram Burkert.
A strong connection to Bach’s manuscript
seeing it laying there was just very, very emotional
Through a special collaboration with the Staatsbibliothek (state library) in Berlin, all members of CONTINUUM had the rare opportunity to view several pages from Bach’s manuscript of the Mass in B Minor during their rehearsal week in that same building in February 2022. Elina says:
“We saw five or six pages. Of course I had checked the whole manuscript on the internet, but seeing it laying there was just very, very emotional. It was wonderful to be able to give all my instrumentalists and singers the opportunity to see it as well. Because I think it’s one thing to be free with the music, to be free with the concept, and to use different instrumentalists. But I am, of course, still very interested in historical performance practice and I get furious if someone is playing the wrong ornaments or the wrong Generalbassaussetzung [basso continuo realization]. So I think that it was just so good to perform this very free version of the B Minor Mass, but sticking to the original autograph we saw in the library.”
Members of CONTINUUM viewing Bach’s manuscript of his Mass in B Minor at the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin. Photos by Alex Potter.
Sensitive and well-balanced ensemble singing
Exciting orchestration aside, this production wouldn’t be as successful as it is without the sensitive and well-balanced ensemble singing by the six fabulous vocalists: sopranos Marie Luise Werneburg and Viola Blache; countertenors Alex Potter and Tobias Knaus; tenor Raphael Höhn; and bass Tobias Berndt. Especially the “Qui Tollis” was fantastic at the concert in Leipzig this year, sung by only four singers, with an incredibly gorgeous entrance by Alex Potter (I already wrote about his “Agnus Dei” aria in my previous post).
The premiere of Missa Miniatura was set for March 3, 2022, in Berlin. Author Jürg Halter had already finished the texts, to be spoken by actor Thomas Halle during the performance, when, on February 24, Russia invaded Ukraine. It made Halter delete all his words and write new, more personal ones. He finished the texts during the night of March 2. Elina adds:
It’s such a huge privilege standing there, performing and making music, while only 700 or 800 kilometers from Berlin, people are dying.
“For me at least, and I think for all of us in the first performances, it was very, very moving because we felt it’s such a huge privilege standing there, performing and making music, while only 700 or 800 kilometers from Berlin, people are dying. The text finishes with the words ‘I want to see you all laughing in peace,’ after which the ‘Agnus Dei’ and ‘Dona Nobis Pacem’ [Grant us Peace] come. Thus, the whole concert is now a manifesto for peace and against war and cruelty. It has gained that additional layer, which is good.”
Jürg Halter. Photo by Rob Lewis.
Here’s an excerpt of the First Reading, which in the performance comes right after the first Kyrie:
“Ich zweifle an uns Menschen. Ich will nicht glauben, dass ich nicht mehr glauben kann. Ich kann nicht mehr glauben, weil ich weiß. Ich weiß, dass nachdem ich als Kind vom Holocaust erfuhr, mein Zweifeln begann. Meine Gebete wurden mehr und mehr zu Anklagen. Je mehr ich über die dunkle Geschichte unserer Spezies erfuhr, desto weniger konnte ich glauben, dass wenn es tatsächlich einen Gott gäbe, er es zulassen würde, dass Menschen durch Menschen vernichtet werden – denn weshalb um alles in der Welt würde er als Allmächtiger so etwas geschehen lassen? Friede auf Erde den Menschen guten Willens? Nein – was ist schon nur mit all den Verbrechen, die im Namen des vermeintlich Guten, im Namen Gottes begannen werden? Ist Gott ein Zyniker? Ich bin verzweifelt. Ich weiß nur, was ich zu wissen glaube. Ich sehe nur: Die große Herrlichkeit gebärt auch die große Schrecklichkeit. Zweifle nicht – aber ich zweifle!”
I doubt us humans. I don’t want to believe that I can no longer believe. I can no longer believe, because I know. I know that my doubts began when I learned about the Holocaust as a child. My prayers started to sound more and more like accusations. The more I learned about the dark history of our species, the less I could believe that if God actually existed, he would let humans destroy other humans – because why on earth would he, as the Almighty, let something like that happen? Peace on earth to people of goodwill? No – what about all crimes committed in the name of the so-called Good, in the name of God? Is God a cynic? I am desperately confused. I only know what I have come to believe. All I can see is that great glory also gives birth to great horror. Doubt not—but I doubt!
At the time of our interview, Elina suggested they might change the texts in a year. But of course, over the past three years, there have been only more reasons to wish for peace, not less. On June 17, 2025, this horrific reality hit me hard as the concert in the Nikolaikirche was starting. So this First Reading affected me more this time, perhaps also because Thomas Halle read it, in my humble opinion, with more confidence and conviction than he did in 2022.
Electric guitar? Yes! And another moving story about a plea for peace
Electric guitarist Bertram Burkert provided a new aspect to the production this year in Leipzig. He did an amazing job playing the notes percussionist Philipp Lamprecht used to play on marimba in previous performances of this piece. His interpretation was completely convincing and very musical. He also played a stellar improvisation to help the spoken text that replaces the first three Credo movements flow into the “Et incarnatus est.” It made the “Et incarnatus est” as poignant as three years ago, albeit in a completely different way. After the concert Elina told me enthusiastically how wonderful it was for her to find a person coming from the jazz world who also loves Baroque music and has such an open mind about combining different styles and traditions of music.
“Schwerter zu Pflugscharen” (Weapons to Plowshares) poster in the Nikolaikirche in Leipzig.
In the “friends and family” row on the second balcony of the Nikolaikirche in Leipzig, my seat was next to a lovely German couple. When I talked to them after the concert, they turned out to be Bertram’s parents. They had traveled there from Weimar and the concert had moved them too. As people who have their roots in church music, they were deeply touched to see and hear their jazz musician son perform Bach, but also moved that they found themselves in the Nikolaikirche. They reminded me this is where the peaceful protests against the GDR had started in the 1980s.3 Nowadays, there are still posters in the Nikolaikirche advertising the Monday evening “Friedensgebet” (prayer for peace), which has been held there every Monday evening since 1982.
When Bertram’s parents told me that during the first 10 years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, they thought this peace was going to last forever, I had to think of Halter’s text in Missa Miniatura‘s Second Reading:
“Never has peace been anything but a long or short phase between wars. You have to be insane to believe in world peace – I would like to be insane. Is that already a profession of faith?”
Let’s talk about it
CONTINUUM’s Missa Miniatura was a great success, not miniature at all in its impact on the audience. Please let me know in the comments if you heard this production at any time over the past three years, how it moved you, and if it made Bach’s Mass in B Minor more transparent for you. Remember, even if you hated it, “we can talk about it!” 🙂
CONTINUUM receiving applause in the Nikolaikirche. Photo by Stefan Haupt.
My heartfelt thanks to Marie-Luise Werneburg, Viola Blache, Alex Potter, Tobias Knaus, Raphael Höhn, Zachary Wilder, Tobias Berndt, Thomas Halle, Johanna Bartz, Anna Schall, Lambert Colson, Joosten Ellée, Liam Byrne, Bertram Burkert, Daniel Rosin, Joseph Crouch, Lola Mlácnik, and Philipp Lamprecht for the two concerts I attended in 2022 and 2025. And to Elina Albach for making time for the interview in 2022, for answering my additional questions this week, for her playing and directing, but most of all for her powerful and inspiring energy!
Only in the Osanna, instruments are taking over some of the notes from the vocal lines, and the tenor and bass singers are „jumping“ between both choirs. In the end, all notes are played or sung. ↩︎
The Three Person St. John Passion (or “Johannes Passion zu Dritt” in German) is Bach’s St. John Passion, arranged by Elina Albach, tenor Benedikt Kristjánsson, and percussionist Philipp Lamprecht for tenor solo, percussion, and organ/harpsichord. The only parts that are eliminated are the tenor arias (yes, that is correct: the tenor sings all the arias except his own) and most notes of the choir are played by harpsichord and percussion. In concert performances of this adaptation, the chorales are sung by the audience. This production became widely known on and after Good Friday 2020, during the Corona pandemic, when it was livestreamed from the St. Thomas Church in Leipzig. Several chorales had been pre-recorded by Bach choir members from all over the world, and these were edited into the live performance. ↩︎
A good explanation of Leipzig’s role in the peaceful revolution of 1989 can be found here. ↩︎
Evangelischer Lieder-Commentarius (Evangelical Hymn Commentary) by Johann Martin Schamel from 1724: an annotated hymnal, published to commemorate the bi-centenary of Luther’s first hymnals. From left to right: the title page; page 89 with the first four verses of Luther’s hymn “Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland,” with lower-case letters and asterisks referring to footnotes; page 91 with the footnotes.
Please open this post in your internet browser (just click on the title at the top) to see the images placed the correct way – thank you!
Today’s cantata – Happy 1st Advent!
Warning: If you don’t feel like reading science journalism, and just came here to listen to a beautiful cantata, I got you: here is Cantata 62Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland in an excellent new live performance by the J.S. Bach Foundation under the direction of Rudolf Lutz. I especially love the opening chorus as well as the tenor aria, sung from memory by Benedikt Kristjánsson (read more about him in my post about the Bachfest in Leipzig this past summer). Other soloists are Lisa Andres, soprano; Antonia Frey, alto; and Peter Harvey, bass.
Find the German text with English translation here, and the score here.
A special exhibition in Eisenach
A month ago, I traveled to Eisenach (Bach’s birthplace in Germany) to catch the last days of a special exhibition at the Bachhaus on the double anniversary of Luther’s hymns (500 years) and Bach’s chorale cantatas (300 years) and the connection between the two. I got to see in real life many hymnals that were in use during Bach’s time. What struck me right away was how small and narrow they are! They were truly meant to be held in one hand (so one could leaf through it with the other hand). This is of course exactly what Luther envisioned when he published the very first German-language hymnals in 1524: that churchgoers could read and sing along during the church service, and also easily use the hymnals at home and at school. This photo gives a good idea of their size compared to a larger book:
Luther’s “Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland”
“Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland” in the Erfurter Enchiridion from 1524.
While most of the hymnals were displayed as in the photo above, the two oldest and rarest, on loan from libraries in Regensburg and Strasbourg, were hidden behind thick felt flaps to protect them from the light. One of these, Luther’s Erfurter Enchiridion (Erfurter Handbook) from 1524, lay opened to his Advent hymn “Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland,” the hymn Bach used two hundred years later, for Cantata 62Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland for the first Sunday of Advent. Luther based this hymn on the then still well-known “Veni redemptor gentium” from the 4th century, closely translating the latin, and only slightly altering the melody.
Publications commemorating the bi-centenary of Luther’s hymnals in 1724 likely influenced Bach
Bach scholars have always wondered why Bach wrote an entire cycle of cantatas based on hymns. Some offer that his first cycle of cantatas (1723/1724) must have been too complicated for his audience (the Leipzig churchgoers) and that Bach, or possibly his employers, thus came up with something extremely familiar (the hymns) as a common thread for the second cycle of cantatas. Others say that the ability of the boy sopranos must have been so bad, judging by letters Bach later wrote to complain about this, that he switched to chorale cantatas so the choir sopranos would only have to sing the well-known chorale melody while the altos, tenors, and basses would sing more complicated parts.
While none, a combination, or part of these hypotheses might be true, recent research by Dutch theologian Dr. Lydia Vroegindeweij provides us with a third theory: Bach was very likely influenced by a strong movement in Lutheran Germany in the first quarter of the 18th century for the preservation and clarification of the original Lutheran hymns. His choice of 1724 as the year to start a cycle of chorale cantatas would thus not have been a coincidence at all, but a way to help commemorate the centenary of Luther’s first hymnals. The most important figures in this movement operated in Bach’s circle of friends and colleagues and of course Bach was a great admirer of Luther, having Luther’s entire oeuvre of writings in his library. So he would have been more than interested to support the efforts to preserve and better explain Luther’s hymns.
Specifically, Lydia makes a strong case that Bach and/or his anonymous librettist must have consulted Johann Martin Schamel’s Evangelischer Lieder-Commentarius (see the caption heading this post) for the recitative and aria texts for several if not all of his chorale cantatas. She has pointed out that many chorale cantata texts correspond to Schamel’s explanations, use the exact same words, or even follow Schamel’s suggestion to combine Luther’s psalm in question with another one (as is the case in Cantata 38, read more here).
As Lydia explains in a podcast she now has on a Dutch radio station, Luther’s hymn “Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland” especially needed clarification, because in an effort to make the text rhyme and stay as close as possible to the original “Veni redemptor gentium,” Luther had made the text so compact that it had puzzled many hymnologists and clergy.
How does Bach illustrate Schamel’s explanations of this particular hymn?
In the first stanza (the literal text of the opening chorus), Schamel puts (a) after the word “Nun” (now) and explains [freely translated]: “As if it meant: Oh come now, you promised! Instead, it is the poetic style, and is not meant as if the Savior had yet to come into the world. But he comes to believers daily, again and again, each time as a new step of grace.” This concept of “again and again” and the “steps” are clearly present in the music of the opening chorus of Cantata 62.
Lydia says: “Schamel substantiates this with a reference to John 14:23. This corresponds with Luther’s own explanation of this verse in the Calov Bible [which Bach was also familiar with, and added to his own library in 1733]. There Luther also talks about daily contact, and about Jesus who would like to live with people in their houses and share a meal with them.”
The emphasis in this cantata is placed more on the sacred miracle of the human birth and less on the “coming”. This “Wunder” (miracle/wonder) is even more celebrated in the tenor aria. Lydia says: “The aria emphasizes that God encompasses the whole world with that kind of miracle and that we can only admire that grace.”
And the prize for the best interpretation of the tenor aria goes to …
When two years ago Lydia and I searched for the best interpretation of the tenor aria, i.e. the one that really emphasizes the “wonder,” our prize went to Jan Kobow on the Gardiner recording from 2000. Listen to it here. Kobow does a beautiful job expressing the wonder, not only in the first phrase, but also in the B-section when he sings “o, Wunder”. He also makes a striking contrast between those wondrous and quiet-making aspects of the miracle and the stronger, more convinced text of “Herrscher.”
However, now that I’ve heard and seen Benedikt Kristjánsson sing on the recording with the J.S. Bach Foundation, his singing strikes me as the perfect illustration of “God encompasses the whole world with that kind of mystery.”
Further reading
If you would like to do your own reading and interpreting of Schamel’s commentary, you can find it here (in German). If you would like to subscribe to Lydia’s newsletter, you can do so here. Also, please don’t forget to subscribe to my blog – just fill in your email address here below, and you will receive an email every time I post a new story. Thank you!
Wieneke Gorter, November 30, 2024.
About Weekly Cantata
I am a bilingual writer, publicist, choral singer, art and nature lover, foodie, happy wife, and blessed mother of two. I started this blog in 2016, inspired by my late mother’s love for Bach’s cantatas. After 23 years in the San Francisco Bay Area, I’m now back in the Netherlands.
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