“The Purcell Choir and Orfeo Orchestra have chosen four of Johann Sebastian Bach’s church cantatas as the material for their first concert of 2012. These works were written between 1724 and 1729 for the first Sunday after Christmas or the New Year's celebrations. Each of the compositions is festive in tone, while the orchestration – besides strings and oboes – assigns an important role to brass instruments: Gottlob! Nun geht das Jahr zu Ende (BWV 28) employs a cornet and three trombones, while t...he characteristic texture in the scoring of the other three cantatas is provided by the virtuosic phrasing of three trumpets. The highlight of this exquisitely beautiful programme of music is the last cantata to be heard, Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied (BWV 190), the first movement of which is an adaptation of the text of the psalms Bach had already set to music in his well-known motet of the same name (BWV 225). The first and second movements of the cantata, which Bach premièred on 1 January 1724, present great difficulty for the modern performer as the original score has not survived. More than half of the original instrumental parts for these movements (the three trumpets, timpani, three oboes, bassoon, viola and basso continuo) have unfortunately been lost. Only the scoring of the four vocal parts (soprano, alto, tenor and bass) and the two violin parts survive today. This means that the two movements – of which the eponymous opening chorus is a piece of rare value even within Bach’s oeuvre – remain borderline cases in terms of our ability to reconstruct them, although, of course, numerous musical scholars have made attempts to complete the score. This evening, the audience will hear a new reconstruction of the work, which our composer friend and colleague Levente Gyöngyösi has prepared expressly for this concert. It is my belief that he has hit upon answers to numerous difficult musical questions arising in connection with the work that are better than any of his predecessors to date. The importance of this cantata to me personally lies in the fact that it was the closing work on the programme of the last concert given by Sir John Eliot Gardiner on his “Bach Cantata Pilgrimage” in 2000 (in New York on 31 December 2000, at St Bartholomew’s Church in Manhattan). I will leave it to you to decide whether this work was a good choice to close a year-long series of concerts, which saw almost 200 cantatas performed and carried such weight in the history of musical interpretation – but in my view, it was.” György Vashegyi Presented by: Orfeo Music Foundation
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