The Bach Choir of Bethlehem brings Bach house to Leipzig, Potsdam…and Schwäbisch-Gmünd – Seen and Heard Worldwide

Germany Bach Choir of Bethlehem European Tour: Nikolaikirche, Potsdam and Thomaskirche, Leipzig. (LV)

There was a quiet, celebratory air within the Thomaskirche when the US Consul Normal proudly launched the Bethlehem Choir which is celebrating its one hundred and twenty fifth anniversary. He praised it as a part of the State Division’s ‘new music initiative’ and certainly one of solely 30 Bach choirs from all around the world who had been invited to carry out the 66 cantatas that Bach composed throughout his second season of Leipzig cantatas, beginning in June 1724.

The Choir made their presence felt on the very starting of ‘Herr Christ, der hinge Gottessohn’, getting into with wholesome, broad, stunning swathes of sound, performed by Christopher Jackson with pure phrasing and swish pacing. The orchestra was made up of strings from Bethlehem and strings and winds from the Mendelssohn Kammerorchester Leipzig, versed in taking part in traditionally knowledgeable Bach on trendy devices. They offered particular moments like Anna Januj’s totally charming soprano recorder solo and chief Elizabeth Discipline’s virtuoso coMMAnd of Baroque have an effect on and gesture. Soprano Nola Richardson had purity, heat and a method that was beautiful, and tenor Lawrence Jones was ardently human. In his large aria with trumPet and oboe da caccia, ‘Wo soll ich fliehn hin’, bass Edmund Milly stole the present. ‘Schmücke dich, o liebe Seele’ was charmingly launched by the organ, and flutist Eriko Oi was beautiful and Jones hilariously chirpy in ‘Ermuntre dich’. The final moments had been significantly shifting because the viewers sang the ultimate chorale together with the Choir.

The Choir took me alongside on their three-hour bus journey the subsequent morning to Herrnhut, the ancestral metropolis of Bethlehem’s founders. Jackson led the Choir and the congregation in a ‘Singstunde’ (tune service) on the Herrnhut Moravian Church which they referred to as the mom church of the Moravian diaspora. We walked by a cemetery resulting in a vista overlooking the valley in direction of what’s now Poland and Czechia the place the unique descendants had come from. Once they sang with the congregation, the sound resonated with the rolling hills and village greens: the completion of a circle from the Moravian church in Bethlehem.

But when the live shows at Leipzig and Herrnhut had their very own musical and emotional satisfactions, it was the music carried out on the different stops on their tour – the Nikolaikirche in Potsdam, of their sister metropolis of Schwäbisch-Gmünd and on the Cathedral in Salzburg – that had been meant to point out why they’re thought of one the nation’s best choirs for Bach and persuasive ambassadors for American music.

And thus, I held this assessment till I might get a video of the Potsdam live performance on 6 June. The highlights had been Schütz and Buxtehude for the locals, and Alice Parker and Caroline Shaw for the US aspect.

In actual fact, the sheer fantastic thing about Buxtehude’s writing, which Nola Richardson and Janna Critz infused with singing of ecstatic accuracy, and the Choir’s understanding that music reminiscent of that is made up of notes and silences, made a robust hyperlink with the emotional iNFLuence of Caroline Shaw’s six-movement To the Fingers which it impressed. After a vocalized Prelude, music from Buxtehude wanders out and in of a musical cloth so granular at occasions that minute shifts in perspective and texture flip the musical axis the other way up. This occurs most movingly within the ‘Litany of the Displaced’ motion which is launched by damaged chords within the strings and wildly uncontrolled harmonies. The ultimate motion, ‘I might maintain you’, involves an finish haltingly, with only a promise.

In Schütz’s ‘Jauchzet dem Herren, alle Welt!’, the dialogue between Discipline and Richardson was incomparable, and Lawrence Jones sang with a particular ardour. The Choir dealt with settings of early American hymn tunes by Carol Barnett and Alice Parker with care and dignity, after which let unfastened in Dominick Argento’s ‘So I’ll Sing with My Voice’.

On the nights previous the Choir’s efficiency of the three Bach cantatas in Leipzig, I heard a wonderful efficiency of Bach’s St. Matthew Ardour by Collegium 1704 from Prague within the Thomaskirche and, within the Nikolaikirche, a three-hour marathon referred to as Motetten und Partiten im Dialog. It featured the incomparable violinist Isabelle Faust as a excessive priestess of Bach in a collection of alternating bits and items of music for solo violin, principally however not completely by Bach, with motets sung by the Monteverdi Choir and Members of the English Baroque Soloists. Faust first appeared behind the choir, then emerged from the organ loft, then got here down the middle aisle. It had huge religious overtones which the theatrical staging deeply enhanced, an indication of the place the ComPetition could also be headed below Michael Maul, its revolutionary inventive director.

6.6.2024: Soloists, Bach Choir of Bethlehem, Members of the Bach ComPetition Orchestra of Bethlehem and the Mendelssohn Kammerorchester of Leipzig / Christopher Jackson (conductor). Nikolaikirche, Potsdam. [reviewed by video]

Schütz – ‘Jauchzet dem Herrn’, SWV.36
Carol Barnett – ‘McKay’ from An American Thanksgiving
Bach – Motets: ‘Lobet den Herrn’, BWV.230; ‘Komm Jesu, komm’, BWV.229
Alice Parker – ‘Wondrous Love’
Buxtehude – ‘Advert manus’ from Membra Jesu Nostri
Josef Rheinberger – ‘Abendlied’, Op.69, No.3
Caroline Shaw – ‘To the Fingers’
William Hawley – ‘Not One Sparrow is Forgotten’
Dominick Argento – ‘So I’ll Sing with My Voice’

10.6.2024: Soloists, the Bach Choir of Bethlehem, members of the Bach ComPetition Orchestra of Bethlehem / Christopher Jackson (conductor). Thomaskirche Leipzig.

Bach – Cantatas 5, 96 and 180

Soloists: Nola Richardson (soprano), Janna Critz (mezzo-soprano), Lawrence Jones (tenor), Edmund Milly (bass)

Laurence Vittes