Tag Archives: Hana Blazikova

Bach Collegium Japan’s St. John Passion live-stream of March 15, 2020

15 Sunday Mar 2020

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Pilate washing his hands by Hendrick ter Brugghen, circa 1617. Lublin Museum, Poland.

Bach Collegium Japan’s live stream from March 15, 2020 is still available online. You can find it here: http://www.philharmonie.tv/veranstaltung/71/

with Aki Matsui, soprano; Damien Guillon, alto; James Gilchrist, tenor (Evangelist); Zachary Wilder, tenor (arias); and Christian Immler, bass.

Aki Matsui replaced Hana Blazikova, who had to return that morning to her home in the Czech Republic, before that country would close its borders.

Already 1/3 into their European tour with Bach’s Passion according to St. John, Bach Collegium Japan was faced with cancellations due to European countries trying to limit the spread of the novel coronavirus. With a live stream from Cologne, Germany, already on their schedule, they decided to go ahead with the live-stream, without audience, and stay in Cologne for a few more days, and record a CD of the St. John Passion there for BIS records.

Via the same link, http://www.philharmonie.tv/veranstaltung/71/ you can also download the PDF of the German-language program book for this performance.

Find the German texts with English translations here, and the score, in two parts: part 1 here, and part 2 here.

I urge you to support all musicians suffering enormous loss of income during this difficult time. Donate at least the money you would otherwise have spent on tickets to their performances, but if you can, give more. Take care of each other, please take social distancing seriously, keep going for walks if allowed, check in on your elderly neighbors, and wash. your. hands.

Also: please realize that these musicians were already on tour, but at this point, please don’t copy their idea, and keep your musicians and staff safe by letting them stay home and practice true social distancing.

Wieneke Gorter, March 15, 2020, updated March 21, 2020.

Two Weimar cantatas for the fourth Sunday of Advent

21 Saturday Dec 2019

Posted by in Advent, Bach's life, Cantatas, Christmas, Leipzig, Weimar

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For the fourth Sunday of Advent, Bach wrote two cantatas in Weimar: Cantata 132 Bereitet die Wege, bereitet die Bahn in 1715, and Cantata 147a Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben in 1716.

Bach rewrote Cantata 147, the same way he did that with cantatas 70 and 186, into a cantata for another time of the year in Leipzig, in this case the feast of the Visitation on July 2, 1723. Read more about that here in my post from 2016. I have now updated that post with a link to the wonderful live performance of Cantata 147 by the J.S. Bach Foundation, with with Hana Blažiková, soprano; Margot Oitzinger, alto; Jakob Pilgram, tenor; and Wolf Matthias Friedrich, bass.

Cantata 132 was not transformed into a cantata for another time in the church year in Leipzig, so today’s performances of this cantata still reflect the Advent cantata from Weimar. Watch a beautiful live performance of this cantata by the Netherlands Bach Society here on YouTube. Soloists are Julia Doyle, soprano; Tim Mead, alto; Jan Kobow, tenor; and Dominik Wörner, bass.

Find the German text with English translations here, and the score here.

As I already pointed out in my Advent Calendar earlier this week, the text of the joyful opening aria refers to the story of John the Baptist, who was believed to have come to prepare the way for Jesus, and includes the Isaiah quote as it appears in the scripture: “Messias kömmt an!” (The Messiah is coming). Bach gives this text to the soprano three times, and to give it extra emphasis, each time omits all instrumental accompaniment on those three words.

The rest of the cantata stays close to the story of John the Baptist. The bass aria refers to the Pharisees interrogating John, but then Bach’s text writer (Salomo Franck, who was also the Weimar court librarian) projects the question “Wer bist du?” (Who are you?) onto the believer: ask your conscience: are you a true person or a false person?

As a child, I was enormously impressed by this bass aria, even more than by the wonderful soprano aria at the beginning of the piece. I loved how Max van Egmond sings the “Wer bist du?” text on the Leonhardt recording from 1983. You can find that recording, and read more about those childhood memories, in this blog post from 2016. I had no idea at the time that in those very cool opening notes Bach is quoting this organ piece by Buxtehude. I only learned that this week, by watching the “extra videos” the Netherlands Bach Society provides along with their live recordings on All of Bach.

If you are not following this blog yet, please consider signing up (on the left of this text if you are on a desktop computer, at the bottom of this post when you are reading on a smartphone). This way you won’t miss any posts about the many cantatas Bach wrote for all three Christmas Days (yes there were three in his time), New Year’s Day, and the Sundays after those feast days.

Wieneke Gorter, December 21, 2019.

The Herreweghe sopranos

11 Sunday Sep 2016

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bwv95_sopraan

The soprano part of cantata 95 Christus, der ist mein Leben. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz

After all his experimenting with the form of the cantata last week, Bach keeps exploring how he can build a cantata based on chorale melodies and chorale texts. As a result, this week’s cantata 95 Christus, der ist mein Leben again takes a unique place in Bach’s cantata collection: it features no less than four different chorales, all part of the Sterbe-lieder (Deathbed songs) that were very popular in Leipzig at the time: Christus, der ist mein Leben; Mit Fried und Freud, ich fahr dahin; Valet will ich dir geben; and Weil du vom Tod erstanden bist.

I recommend Herreweghe’s recording of this cantata. Listen to this recording on YouTube, or on Spotify. Support the artists and purchase this recording on Amazon. (Or find them in the Amazon stores  for  Germany and France)

Soloists: soprano Dorothee Mields, counter-tenor Matthew White, tenor Hans Jörg Mammel, bass Thomas E. Bauer. Choir sopranos: Dorothee Mields, Hana Blazikova, Dominique Verkinderen.

In the manuscript of the soprano part pictured above, it is interesting to note the dynamic markings for the text “Sterben ist mein Gewinn.” Dynamics are not very common in Bach manuscripts, but, as Alfred Dürr points out, Leipzig had a strong tradition of singing softly and slowly on the word “Sterben,” and singing loudly on “ist mein Gewinn,” going back at least to 1629. In that year, then Thomaskantor Johann Hermann Schein wrote this note for his singers:

“da singen sie adagio mit einem sehr langsamen Tactu, weiln in solchen versiculis verba emphatica enthalten” (here you should sing adagio in a very slow tempo, because verses like these contain emphatic words)

How Herreweghe’s sopranos sing this Sterben ist mein Gewinn in the first chorale takes my breath away, and this is the most important reason why I prefer this recording. Having grown accustomed to the boy choirs of the Leonhardt and Harnoncourt recordings in the 1970s, my parents, sister, and I were blown away by Herreweghe’s Collegium Vocale Gent when their first CDs started coming out in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

My mother was especially taken by the sound and blend of the sopranos, and “Herreweghe sopranos” became a household term in our family. After attending a performance by a different group, we would often say to each other: “it was nice, but they are not Herreweghe sopranos….,” and sigh a little.

In an interview on the DVD “Herreweghe by himself” Herreweghe says about the process of auditioning them: “they have to be young women, good singers of course, with the right voice for our group, but also a certain … piousness.” **

Whether you agree with that or not, I always have to think of that quote when I see and hear Dorothee Mields sing. Her recitative and chorale are out of this world. Watch a wonderful interview with her here.

This cantata is all about longing for life after death, and over the course of the cantata these statements are made: I will be happy to die (opening movement), because life on earth is worthless (soprano recitative). Saying goodbye to that will be freeing (soprano chorale), so please can I die as soon as possible (tenor recitative and aria), because death is only a sleep (bass recitative) from which I will wake up to join Jesus, who has gone before me (closing chorale).

The outstanding tenor aria features Bach’s signature “death bells” in the pizzicato strings. Bach uses these “Leichenglocken”  also in cantatas 73, 8, 105, 127, 161, and 198. [Thanks again to Eduard van Hengel for this list]. For an alternative recording of this movement, with gorgeous singing by Mark Padmore, listen to the Gardiner recording on Spotify.

The concept of death being only a short period of sleep after which the dying person wakes up to meet Jesus in the afterlife was an extremely important part of 18th-century Lutheran faith. When dealing with death on a daily basis, it was comforting to believe that death would ultimately lead to paradise. And by stressing this concept, Bach also refers to the Gospel for this 16th Sunday after Trinity. It is the story of the miracle at Nain: a young man who has died  is carried out of the city and then woken up by Jesus.

Wieneke Gorter, September 11, 2016, with links updated November 15, 2019

** the statement that they should be young women was only correct in the very beginning, Dominique Verkinderen (founding member, long-time staff member, director of auditions) was still singing in the soprano section when I wrote this.

Children’s stories

03 Saturday Sep 2016

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Bergrede_Brueghel

The Sermon on the Mount, oil on copper painting by Jan Brueghel the Elder, 1598

In 1723 Bach wrote cantata 138 Warum betrübst du dich, mein Herz.  Again I prefer Herreweghe’s interpretation, but it’s not so easy to choose between his recording from 1998 (with soloists Deborah York, Ingeborg Danz, Mark Padmore, and Peter Kooij) and the one from 2013 (with soloists Hana Blazikova, Damien Guillon, Thomas Hobbs, and Peter Kooij). Update from 2021: there now is an extremely inspired Herreweghe recording with all my favorite soloists (Dorothee Mields, Alex Potter, Guy Cutting, Peter Kooij), recorded live at De Singel in Antwerp on Sunday January 31, 2021 (during the Covid19 pandemic, so without audience). Find it here.

Listen to the entire 1998 recording on Youtube or listen to one long track of the 2013 recording with Hana Blazikova and Damien Guillon on YouTube. Please consider supporting the artists by purchasing the 1998 version (used copies available only) or the 2013 version  on Amazon.

Find the text, based on the Sermon on the Mount, of this cantata here, and the score here.

It is often not immediately clear what a Bach cantata is about, what the text means, or what Bach wanted to convey with it. In an absolutely wonderful interview (with excellent English subtitles) for the Leipzig Bach Festival, soprano Dorothee Mields says that even she, as a native German speaker, often feels the need to look at English translations, go back to the Bible texts, and read more about the subject, because she didn’t necessarily recognize the text from her children’s bible.

The image of the children’s bible stuck with me since first watching the interview seven months ago. And when listening to the cantata for this Sunday, I had to think of it again, because the choice of words in this cantata is very moving, but at the same time so simple, that it is almost as if the librettist is speaking to children. Listen, for example, to the text the soprano sings in the third movement:

Nur ich, ich weiss nicht, auf was Weise ich armes Kind mein bisschen Brot soll haben; Wo ist jemand, der sich zu meiner Rettung findt?

(It is just that I, poor child, don’t know how I should receive a bit of bread; Where is the person who will save me?)

Eduard van Hengel hilariously remarks that it reminds him a bit of Calimero (a popular children’s cartoon about a little chick, which aired in The Netherlands, Belgium, France, and Italy in the early 1970s. Watch this first episode to get an idea).

I wonder who the librettist for this cantata was. I imagine a different person than who wrote texts for the last few cantatas. Last week, the Bachs possibly had their house full with the families of Anna Magdalena’s brother and sisters, visiting because the men, all trumpet players, were needed for two cantatas. Perhaps one of the visitors had talent for entertaining the children with stories and making up poems on the spot? Did Bach ask this person to write the libretto for this cantata? Or was his own head still filled with children’s stories and did he write the text himself?

These are all just assumptions and we don’t know for sure if last week’s extra players were the relatives of Bach’s wife, but my potential movie script is getting better and better …

There’s of course more to this cantata than the charming texts. Musically, as far as the form and structure is concerned, this cantata is unique within this first cycle of Leipzig cantatas. Bach takes a chorale as the base for the cantata, yet it is not at all the same as his series of chorale cantatas from the 1724/1725 cycle. In those later chorale cantatas, he always uses all the verses and keeps a strict structure of one soloist per movement. In this cantata 138, he only uses three verses of the chorale, and gives the cantata a very free form, with a different number of soloists for each movement. He is obviously experimenting. And I wonder again: might he have been influenced by his visitors from last week? Did he have discussions about his compositions with his colleagues? And how is this playing around with the form of the cantata related to using a different librettist or no librettist? Did he not want to bother a professional writer with his experimenting?

There is one more–for me at least–exciting aspect to this cantata: when I first started listening to it, I discovered that I already knew the bass aria. Same singer (Peter Kooij) and same music, but a different text, because I had until then only heard this as the Gratias from Bach’s Mass in G Major, BWV 236 from the mid 1730s. Listen to both, and marvel at Bach’s talent for subtle recycling.

Wieneke Gorter, September 3, 2016, updated September 19, 2020 and February 13, 2021.

Christmas in August

27 Saturday Aug 2016

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gesu_lebbrosi
Jesus heals ten lepers, from the Codex Aureus of Echternach, c. 1035-1040

Only a handful of Bach cantatas ask for the Renaissance/Early Baroque ensemble of one cornetto and three trombones in the opening and closing chorus. This instrumentation was considered somewhat “old fashioned” in Bach’s time, while at the same time it was still very normal in cities to hear Stadtpfeifers (city pipers) play chorales from the towers during the day, to remind the citizens of their Christian duties. In this Cantata 25 Es ist nichts Gesundes an meinem Leibe, for the 14th Sunday after Trinity (August 29 in 1723), the playing of the chorale tune by this ensemble in the opening chorus stands for the way it has always been, the way it has been true for centuries.

palatino
Concerto Palatino, the leading cornetto/trombone ensemble for the past 25 years. Photo by Sabrina Flauger. Learn more about them here.

My preferred recording of Cantata 25 is the one by Herreweghe, on the same album as cantata 105 for Trinity 9 and cantata 46 for Trinity 10, as well as cantata 138 for next week. Soloists in cantata 25: soprano Hana Blažíková, tenor Thomas Hobbs, and bass Peter Kooij. Cornetto: Bruce Dickey  (pictured above, front row, on left); trombones: Claire McIntyre, Simen van Mechelen (pictured above, top row, on left), and Joost Swinkels.

Listen to this recording on Spotify or on YouTube. Please consider supporting the artists by purchasing this album (containing four cantatas for this 1723 Trinity season) on Amazon.

Read the text of this cantata here, and find the score here.

I could write an entire blog post about the opening chorus alone, the way I did last week for cantata 77 and two weeks earlier for cantata 179. But in the interest of variety, I’m going to keep this section short, and I will just say that the opening chorus  is an incredible, unrivaled complex composition for ten voices, again completely different than any opening chorus the Leipzig congregations had heard before during this Trinity season of 1723. By having the “ancient” brass quartet play the chorale melody of Herzlich tut mich verlangen nach einem selgen End (With my whole heart I long for my blessed End / my Salvation)** Bach shows that the promise of salvation after death will always provide a silver lining to the sorrow of the daily, sinful human condition. He also illustrates this “salvation” with the recorders in the uplifting and soothing soprano aria (Hana Blažíková in top shape!), and the brass and recorders in the closing chorale, and intensifies the “sickness” of the human sins by setting these texts to “dry” recitatives  (though listen to that bass arioso, beautifully sung by Peter Kooij) in between. Again, it was completely normal in his day and age to think this way, and Bach saw it as his mission in life to teach this theology to his fellow Lutherans by way of his church music.

But, listen to the festive, large orchestra for this cantata! No less than four brass players (one cornetto and three trombones) and five wind players (two oboists and three recorder players) were required at the same time in the opening chorus and closing chorale. For a cantata about the healing of ten lepers? Well, it turns out that this weekend it was Christmas in August for Bach, and the extra players were probably in town for the much more important and incredibly festive Cantata 119 Preise, Jerusalem, den Herrn that was on the calendar for the next day, Monday August 30, the day of the inauguration of the new City Council (Ratswechsel). *** As I already suggested in my post about cantata 147, Bach might have sometimes used guest musicians in his orchestra who were in town for other reasons, and judging from the level of playing required for the Brandenburg concerto-like Cantata 119, the extra brass (all playing trumpet in 119) and wind (playing oboe and recorder in 119) players might have been needed to be of the level of court chamber musician, not just Stadtpfeifer (usually a lower rank, and not necessarily used to playing the complicated court music). So in my probably not so unlikely movie script fantasy, Bach hired musicians from the not too far away courts where he had worked before or where his in-laws worked (Köthen, Weissenfels, Zerbst) to play in the orchestra on Monday August 30, and he had asked them to also play in the service on Sunday August 29.

Listen to the Ratswechsel cantata 119 Preise, Jerusalem, den Herrn as recorded by Herreweghe on YouTube. (Soloists: soprano Deborah York; alto Ingeborg Danz; tenor Mark Padmore, bass Peter Kooij.)

Wieneke Gorter, August 24, 2016, updated September 10, 2020.

** Several writers have suggested the chorale best known to the congregation at the time (on the melody we have later come to know as O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden) would have been instead Ach Herr, mich armen Sünder, but I agree with Eduard van Hengel that because of Bach’s use of the angel-like recorders and the heavenly brass it makes more sense to go with Herzlich tut mich verlangen nach einem selgen End.

*** The new city council was always chosen on August 24, and then inaugurated on the first Monday following August 24, which was Monday August 30 in 1723.

Trinity 10: my favorite counter-tenor in the spotlight

30 Saturday Jul 2016

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For this Sunday, Trinity 10, August 1, 1723 Bach wrote cantata 46 Schauet doch und sehet, ob irgend ein Schmerz sei.

This is another exquisite cantata, worth listening to (or worth watching for a bit, see link below for a wonderful video of the opening chorus by Herreweghe live at the Saintes Festival).

I recommend Herreweghe’s recording from 2012, on the same album already discussed in my previous post for cantata 105.

Purchase this recording on Amazon (the album also includes last week’s cantata 105, and two more cantatas from the 1723 Trinity season).

Listen to this Herreweghe recording from 2012 on Spotify.

Or, listen to this same recording on YouTube, via playlist I created (if this shows up as a visual on your screen,  and clicking on the main “play button” results in a “this video cannot be played” message, click on the icon on the top left where it says 1/6, and it should work):

Or watch these same performers in a live video of the opening chorus only from the Festival de Saintes.

Please find the text here, and the score here.

I especially enjoy this cantata because of the beautiful opening chorus, the dramatic bass aria (with corno da tirarsi!) and the alto aria.

You’ll recognize the first part of the opening chorus. Bach must have liked this enough to re-use it later as the Qui Tollis in his Mass in B minor. The illustration of the “Schmerz” with two recorders and two oboi da caccia in the orchestra is beautiful.

Last week, with cantata 105, Bach started using features that preluded his passions. In the alto aria in this cantata 46, there is again a reference to the St. Matthew Passion. The pastoral character of the music, as well as the text reference to Küchlein (chicks) make me think of the Sehet Jesus hat die Hand alto aria. I am a huge fan of counter-tenor Damien Guillon. In 2011, I heard him sing for the first time in a live performance of the St. Matthew Passion by Herreweghe in Europe, and have been collecting his recordings since then. He appears on recordings with his own ensemble Le Banquet Celeste, cantata recordings by Herreweghe from 2011 and later, and on several recordings of Marcel Ponseele’s ensemble Il Gardellino. Watch an interview with him (with English subtitles) on YouTube:

Wieneke Gorter, July 30, 2016, links updated August 16, 2020.

Belated Trinity 9

30 Saturday Jul 2016

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My apologies for the delay in posting this – the cantata for Trinity 9 (July 25, 1723 / July 24, 2016) is cantata 105 Herr, gehe nicht ins Gericht.

In the previous episode of this special 1723 Leipzig Trinity series we saw how Trinity 8 marked the start of the shorter cantata, containing only around 6 movements instead of 10 to 14 movements. However, that weeks’ cantata was probably still based on earlier compositions. This means that cantata 105 Herr, gehe nicht ins Gericht could be considered the start of the true Leipzig cantata.

Two striking “Leipzig only” features make an appearance in this cantata: clear references to Bach’s future Passions (see below), and the “corno da tirarsi” (slide horn).

Only three cantatas (Trinity 10’s cantata 46, as well as 162 and 67) show the full name corno da tirarsi written in the manuscript, but there are 27 cantatas from Leipzig requiring a corno in which that part is not playable on a natural horn, so must have been written for this corno da tirarsi as well. Cantata 105 is included in that group. Bach is the only composer who ever mentioned this instrument in writing, and most probably his principal brass player Gottfried Reiche was the only one who ever played it. After Reiche’s death in 1734 Bach did not write for this instrument anymore, and for repeat performances of any cantatas containing a corno da tirarsi part, Bach rewrote it for other instruments. Read more about this in Olivier Picon’s article on the “corno da tirarsi” from 2010. 

Herreweghe has recorded this cantata 105 Herr, gehe nicht ins Gericht twice: first in 1992 (with soloists Barbara Schlick, Gerard Lesne, Howard Crook, and Peter Kooij), and again in 2012 (with soloists Hana Blazikova, Damien Guillon, Thomas Hobbs, and again Peter Kooij).

Though that first recording from 1992 is excellent, and the soprano aria on that recording has more character to my taste, I recommend the 2012 recording for the following reasons:

  1. At the time of the 1992 recording, no corno da tirarsi was available, which means that on that recording the tenor aria on that recording has an oboe accompaniment. The recording from 2012 does feature a corno da tirarsi in this aria.
  2. The “Herr, Herr” exclamations are more prominent in the opening chorus of the 2012 recording, and the tempo of the opening chorus is also a bit faster, which I like.
  3. The album, which includes three other cantatas, focuses on 1723 Trinity cantatas only, which of course is extra special for this blog’s special 1723 Trinity series.

Listen to this 2012 recording by Herreweghe on Spotify.

Listen to this 2012 recording on YouTube, by way of a playlist I created (it is possible that this only works for readers in the USA):

Support the artists and purchase this recording on Amazon or on iTunes. (it’s always worth it, but this time you’ll get three more cantatas in that same album that will be discussed on this blog in the coming weeks!)

Read the German text with English translations here, and find the score here.

Listen for the “Herr, Herr” exclamations in the opening chorus. They will appear in the opening chorus of the St. John Passion in early 1724. The exquisite soprano aria has no bass instrument in the continuo. Bach will later use that feature more often in other Leipzig cantatas, to either show purity or uncertainty, and it is a strong feature of the Aus Liebe aria from the St. Matthew Passion. And last but not least: when I listen to the bass arioso from this cantata 105, I am strongly reminded of the bass arioso Am Abend da es kühle war from the St. Matthew Passion. The music is not 100% the same, but very similar, and there are also references in the text.

Other stunning features of this cantata 105: the strings accompanying the soprano aria illustrate the “shivering” and “quavering” in the text, and those same “uncertain” strings turn up again in the orchestra part of the closing chorale.

Wieneke Gorter, July 30, 2016, links updated August 8, 2020.