Johann Sebastian Bach

I knew only a few popular works of Sebastian Bach before my teens, so when a musical friend at high school asked me which was my favourite of the Brandenburg Concertos, I had not heard a single note of any of them. Not wanting to decline to answer out of vanity, I made a guess – “no. 3” – which is indeed my favourite, but at the time I was ignorant even of how many concertos Bach had written for the Margrave of Brandenburg. This encounter spirred me to acquire a corpus of recordings of Bach; since then I have sung in performances of the Mass in B minor, the St John Passion, and several cantatas, including Nun ist das Heil und die Kraft as appears below.

I sang in performances of this wonderful cantata movement on Michaelmas 2000 and again at roughly the same time of year in 2001. Falling neatly into two halves, this sole movement (of what must have been a large festal cantata for St Michael’s day) has a vigorous double choir fugue, framed by glorious writing for trios of oboes, trumpets, and violins and viola, rounded out by timpani and continuo. The total effect is reminiscent of the Sanctus of the Mass in B minor.