As a listener and sometime performer, I feel the same anxiety about living long enough to experience Bach's 200-plus sacred cantatas, the largest, most ingeniously varied and certainly greatest body ...

“Ich habe genug,” Bach’s Cantata No. 82, is commonly rendered in English as “I am content.” At the cantata’s center is a lullaby of consoling sweetness, generosity of spirit and somnolent blessedness, ...

LEIPZIG, Germany — “Bach’s best.” It’s an irresistible concept, but does it mean anything? Such judgments are always fraught when it comes to artistic creations, even more so where the primary purpose ...

The performance of a cantata was an important part of the liturgy in Lutheran churches. It was a medium by which to interpret readings from the Scriptures and proclaim the Gospel. In this course we ...

Sometimes music is most moving when it evokes the past. Familiar works that engage listeners in emotional time-travel include Vaughan Williams’ “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis” and much of the ...

The Leipzig Bach Festival is an annual event. But it has surely never been quite like this before. The festival’s artistic director, Michael Maul, and the president and director, respectively, of the ...

In his cantatas and church works, Bach frequently employs lively dance rhythms to express the most exuberant forms of worship. In the conclusion to his cantata “Praise the Lord, My Soul” (BWV 143), ...

Listen up, caffeine fiends. The Milwaukee Symphony will present Bach's Coffee Cantata in the most appropriate place possible — a coffee shop. In a one-of-a-kind, one-night-only event, Milwaukee ...

Modern biographers of the great classical composers have often been reluctant to concede the sincerity of their subjects’ assertions of religious belief. Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Wagner, ...

Where resides the best Bach Orchestra and Chorus in the world? Leipzig? Berlin? Germany at least? Amsterdam – where the great Bach tradition still lives on vibrantly? London, where the early music ...