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This was the first cantata programme in this pilgrimage to take place on what was for many of us home soil. After three of the most intense weeks of musicmaking beginning at Christmas in Weimar, continuing in Berlin over New Year and in Leipzig and Hamburg at Epiphany, some of the group were concerned that the special atmosphere might have evaporated, and with it the extraordinary quality of listening that German audiences bring to this music. With the Royal Naval College at Greenwich packed to the rafters on two consecutive evenings we need not have worried. At first glance one might have thought it a little odd that, for a Sunday in which the Collect is ‘Unto us a child is born. Hallelujah!’, Bach left us three cantatas with the titles ‘My God, how long, ah! how long?’ (BWV 155), ‘Ah God, what deep affliction’ (BWV 3) and ‘My sighs, my tears’ (BWV 13). Was this just a case of the Lutheran clergy making a fetish of the hair-shirt approach to life’s woes? The texts of the cantatas inscribe a path from mourning to consolation – one illuminated by Bach’s music – and, by varying degrees of emphasis on the Gospel for the day (the miracle of the turning of water into wine), they employ this as a symbol of the transformation of earthly troubles into heavenly bliss. They also point to the ‘proper’ time (‘Mine hour is not yet come’, Jesus said to his mother) at which the believers’ long vigil of tribulation and doubt will finally end...

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CD-1:
Cantatas for the Second Sunday after Epiphany :
Mein Gott, wie lang, ach lange?, BWV 155
Ach Gott, wie manches Herzeleid, BWV 3
Meine Seufzer, meine Tränen, BWV 13

CD-2:
Cantatas for the Fourth Sunday after Epiphany :
Ach wie flüchtig, ach wie nichtig, BWV 26 (For the Twenty-fourth Sunday after Trinity)
Jesus schläft, was soll ich hoffen?, BWV 81
Wär Gott nicht mit uns diese Zeit, BWV 14
Motete: Jesu, meine Freunde, BWV 227


Joanne Lunn & Katharine Fuge, sopranos
Richard Wyn Roberts & William Towers, altos
Julian Podger & Paul Agnew, tenores
Gerald Finley & Peter Harvey, bajos
The Monteverdi Choir
The English Baroque Soloists
John Eliot Gardiner, direction




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