A Celebration of Bach Thursday 27 August and Available for 30 Days After Viewing

A Celebration of Bach Thursday 27 August And available for 30 days after viewing St Martin's Voices Gabriella Noble Director Zeb Soanes Presenter Ben Giddens Organ Adrian Bradbury Cello St Martin-in-the-Fields, Trafalgar Square London WC2N 4JJ Tel: 020 7766 1100 Online: www.smitf.org St Martin's Summer Online Festival 2020 St Martin’s is delighted to present St Martin’s Summer Online Festival. Our first concert series since March explores the musical heritage of St Martin’s and features a fresh look at our most-beloved repertoire. Although audiences will need to watch from home for now, all the concerts are recorded in St Martin’s and introduced by much loved BBC Radio 4 presenter and author Zeb Soanes. The performances are broadcast on Thursday evenings at 7.30pm, and available to watch for 30 days afterwards. Tonight's programme includes of some of Bach’s most beautiful and virtuosic choral motets on themes of religious longing, comfort and praise, intertwined with the haunting for Cello Suite No 4 and the celebrated Suite for Cello No 1. Please do keep an eye our final concert in our Summer Online Festival – The Glories of Venice (Thursday 3 September) – tickets are available through the St Martin’s website. As the impact of COVID-19 takes hold, we need people like you to keep helping us and the musicians we work with. Each concert in our festival costs around £2,000 to produce. If you are able to make a donation, please visit www.smitf.org/give. Thank you for helping to keep our doors open this year. Dr Andrew Earis Director of Music PROGRAMME Lobet den Herrn, alle Heiden – J.S. Bach (1685-1750) Suite for Cello No 1 in G – J.S. Bach i. Prelude ii. Allemande iii. Courante iv. Sarabande v. Minuet I vi. Minuet II vii. Gigue Komm, Jesu, komm – J.S. Bach Suite for Cello No 4 in E flat – J.S. Bach i. Prelude ii. Allemande iii. Courante iv. Sarabande v. Bourrée vi. Gigue Der Geist hilft unser Schwachheit auf – J.S. Bach PROGRAMME NOTES by Charlotte Marino Johann Sebastian Bach was born into a large family of established musicians in Eisenach, Germany, in March 1685. His father and uncles were all professional musicians with formidable reputations and the young Johann Sebastian had ample opportunities to learn the family trade, studying music theory, violin and keyboard instruments with his father and older brothers. This seemingly idyllic musical upbringing, however, took a painful turn when Bach was nine years old and his parents both died within nine months of each other. Fortunately, the orphaned Bach was adopted by his uncle Johann Christoph, who oversaw his continuing development as a chorister, organist and – eventually – composer. From the age of 18, Bach was engaged in a number of official positions as a church and court musician in the towns Arnstadt, Weimar and Anhalt-Cöthen, where he became experienced with the fashionable styles across both sacred and secular music. In May 1723, Bach moved to Leipzig to take up the prestigious role which he would occupy for the remaining 27 years of his life: Director of Choir and Music at St Thomas’ in Leipzig. It was here that he achieved his masterworks of sacred vocal music, including the majority of his 200+ cantatas, the St John Passion (1724), St Matthew Passion (1736-42) and Mass in B minor (1749). Lobet den Herrn, alle Heiden J.S. Bach While Cantor at St Thomas’s Church in Leipzig, Bach wrote an array of vocal motet’s, largely as accompaniment to memorials of the recently departed. Many have a sombre quality, but others are more radiant and almost celebratory, perhaps indicating towards the era’s ideals that death released us from life’s sufferings. We wonder whether this perspective came from the frequency in which people of the 18th century faced death; Bach himself buried over ten of his children, so it is no surprise that his music is full of such contrasting emotions of passion and complexity, and high intensity followed by lighter honouring and praise of the Lord. One of the most vibrant and fanfare-like of the motets is Lobet den Herrn, alle Heiden, each line of which is treated in a unique and colourful way. The text is taken from the more celebratory language of psalm 117, rather than usual mournful tones of burial music, and is a wonderful demonstration of impressive fugue writing and infectious counterpoint. Listen out for the opening which is trumpeted out in fiendish vocal movement, starting with the sopranos and working its way down to the basses. Suite for Cello No 1 in G J.S. Bach Bach wrote six cello suites based around Baroque dance types and all six are widely considered to be some of his greatest musical achievements. The technical demands within the suites are fiendish, requiring a breathtaking amount of artistic depth and interpretation to perform, with some of the most emotionally intense passages composed within Baroque repertoire. It demands years – if not a lifetime – to master. One man who did just that was 13-year-old Catalan cello student, Pablo Casals, who discovered a printed copy of the suites at a second-hand bookseller in Barcelona in 1890. Up to this point, the suites were dismissed simply as study pieces for the instrument, but after dedicating nearly fifty years to the practice and performance of the works, Casals finally recorded them and ensured they were established firmly in the repertoire of masterworks. Suite for Cello No 1 in G is possibly the most recognisable of the collection. For the listeners, Bach offers a spectacle of the widest range of complex playing techniques, composing the music in the key of G so that the lowest two strings release the most amount of natural resonance when bowed. The result is a rocking, undulating pattern of open harmony that feels powerful and pure toned. There is no accompaniment, so this resonance is important - the split chords have been so cleverly composed that our brains are presented with single notes, but are able to sense and construct far more colour around just the one monophonic line. Komm, Jesu, komm J.S. Bach Although the form of ‘motet’ was starting to be considered outdated at the time when Bach was composing, these choral works became the only vocal pieces which remained in repertoire between Bach’s death in 1750 and the Bach Revival of the 19th century. We are unsure as to the exact number of motets that Bach wrote, because scripts have been lost, but we know it is an awful lot. As well as Church music, some scholars believe Bach wrote a selection of his motets with a pedagogical use, for the benefit of his younger sisters whom he taught theory and voice. Komm, Jesu, komm, is an example of Bach’s more funereal style of motet writing, as opposed to the joyous alternative. Filled with gorgeous suspensions, the effect of his writing is hypnotic to the listener. Bach intricately weaves between two choirs and colours the repeated text with dramatic intervals and melismatic semi-quaver passages. A striking set of text ends the first stanza – "I am the way, the truth and the life" – with most of the motet being devoted to these words. The second stanza is set as a simple chorale which finishes the motet in calm contemplation. Suite for Cello No 4 in E flat J.S. Bach During the period in which Bach composed his cello suites (1717-1723), the composer had a virtuoso chamber ensemble at his disposal for the only period in his life, hence a lot of his instrumental works — including the Brandenburg concertos, the partitas and sonatas for violin and almost certainly the cello suites — date from these years. Sadly, the original manuscripts of his cello works never survived, so musicians work from a copy made by Bach’s wife, Anna Magdalena. There is speculation as to whether Anna Magedalena contributed to the composition of the series of suites, alongside many other questions around the interpretation of articulation, bowings and dynamics, whether Bach wrote an accompaniment to the single line, and even which instrument he originally scored for. The cello suite journey increases in its virtuosity and development of imagination. The Suite No 4 in E flat is thought-provoking and philosophical, but manages to avoid venturing towards a melancholic tone. In the first three suites, the cellist frequently plays open strings, giving an open resonance and allowing the extremes of register to sound freely. But in the Suite in E flat, the sound is far more strained and yearning. The work champions the warm, deep and wooden sonority of the cello, and somehow embraces a world of stimulation within relative simplicity. Der Geist hilft unser Schwachheit auf J.S. Bach We end with a final motet and one of Bach’s most ravishing harmonisations – the lightest, most radiant and most gracious of all of his motet compositions, Der Geist hilft Unser Schwachheit auf. Full of vivacity and joy, the theme of mourning is not focused on, instead the text spins around the Spirit and salvation, with Bach’s signature melismas and melodic ‘sighs’ comforting the listener of their faith in Jesus Christ. Bach’s colourful writing is the truest form of musical word painting and his compositional complexity is as thrilling to sing as it is to listen to. In the final fugue, Bach reduces the double choir back to a single collective, and brings the piece to a close with a feeling of calmness, resolution and grounding for the listener.

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