Bach and the Liturgical Year

Given the close links between Bach's sacred music and the specific requirements of his vocation as a church musician, it's a bit odd that recordings specifically exploring Bach's musical thinking about the liturgical year are so rare, especially since, as annotator Lucie Renaud points out, Bach himself told one of his organ students that he should play chorales "with the sentiment conveyed by the words." This group of Canadian and American musicians deserves kudos for its single-disc attempt to interest listeners in this aspect of Bach's musical personality. They don't plunge wholesale into one of the yearly cantata cycles Bach wrote in Leipzig, and they counterpoint organ chorales, which were as time-specific as their vocal counterparts, with cantatas. The general impression conveyed is that the correspondence between the mood of a specific work and the nature of the service for which it was written is intermittent but is certainly present. Bach, after all, was notorious for recycling all kinds of compositions. But it adds something to the aria from "Jesus soll mein erstes Wort," from the Cantata No. 171, (Jesus will be my first word), written for New Year's services, in this way: Bach matches the text with an exuberant spirit of musical renewal that diverges somewhat from the operatic language of other cantatas. The performances are generally strong. American musician Washington McClain, playing Baroque oboe and oboe da caccia, and Luc Beauséjour, on a small organ, are especially lovely. If there is a weak point it is soprano Shannon Mercer, who has an attractive tone but doesn't enter fully into the spirit of the project. Check out the aria "Komm in meines Herzenshaus" (track 15), written for Reformation Day (October 31, the date on which Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door in Wittenberg): the passionate text, "Come into my heart's house, Jesus, my desire, drive the world and Satan out!," is virtually a credo of Protestantism, but Mercer is too neutral by half here. On balance this is well worth hearing, especially for performers; it will stimulate new ideas for tying Bach's music not only to its own time and place, but to new performance contexts. All texts are in German, English, and French, with booklet notes only on the latter two languages. ~ James Manheim, All Music Guide