Word: cantatas
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Thomas school in Leipzig. Along the first floor, where the choirmaster lives, the windows glow with candlelight. A young Hausfrau, surrounded by half a dozen children and pregnant with another, bustles through the cluttered rooms preparing dinner. Her husband is busy copying the parts of his latest cantata, which he must soon rehearse with his musicians and singers for next morning's service, at the church across the courtyard...
Church or concert, Christmas or midsummer, there is one striking thing about the new audience for Bach. It is young. At the weekly Bach cantata performances at Manhattan's Holy Trinity Lutheran Church, the congregation sports more beards than button-downs, appears to be almost entirely under 35. "Students will brave rainstorms to wait in line for standing room at a Bach recital," marvels German Organist Helmut Walcha. Record stores report a marked increase in the number of teen-agers thronging around the classical counters, buying up Bach without so much as a glance at the new Beatles album...
...distinction between sacred and secular. Bach often borrowed from his secular music for sacred occasions, just as Martin Luther had used love songs and barrack ballads for some of his chorales. He even turned out such mundane pieces as a song on the joys of pipe smoking or a cantata about the glories of coffee. But the attitude behind all of his music was, as he noted in his manuscripts, "Deo soli gloria" (to God alone the glory...
Bach was the last great voice of the polyphonic style that had lasted since the early 17th century. The very forms he favored-fugue, church cantata, motet-were outmoded as he used them, and he knew it. "My art," he said, "has become old-fashioned...
Miss Wilsen's voice (her "instrument" as vocalists in the know might say) is basically as lovely as her appearance, though it can have an unpleasant choked sound in the lower register. Her performance at Holmes unfortunately revealed serious technical problems in handling the music. The Bach solo cantata was the closest to coloratura the Master ever came, and is a tough order for anyone to handle. Wednesday night Bach's elegant roulades were indistinct and slow; the tempo dragged at every soprano entrance. The accompanying trumpet, string quartet, and harpsichord, though. perfectly competent, was unconducted and therefore had major...