Sunday, February 5, at 3pm in the Sanctuary, The Collegium Vocale of St. Louis will present a concert of Baroque sacred music, “Johann Sebastian Bach, Four Sacred Cantatas.” Admission is free. The concert will be preceded by an introductory lecture by Bruce Carvell, Ph.D. at 2:30pm.
Johann Sebastian Bach is one of the towering figures of Western music history, having composed a vast amount of both vocal and instrumental music. While he was in Leipzig, he composed a cantata a week for three years. These wonderful and varied compositions range from those composed for a single voice through magnificent settings of splendor. The program will feature three of his Leipzig cantatas: Cantata 157, “Ich lasse dich nicht,” Cantata 124, “Meinen Jesum laß ich nicht,” and Cantata 9, “Es ist das Heil uns kommen her,” as well as Cantata 150, “Nach dir, Herr, verlanget mich,” Bach’s first cantata, from his Arnstadt period (1704-08). The Collegium Vocale of St. Louis will be accompanied by an ensemble of top local baroque wind and string players, who will be joined by Joyce Alper, of Boston, MA, playing baroque oboe d’amore, a rarely heard cousin of the oboe that was cultivated solely in Germany during the first half of the 18th century.
The Collegium Vocale of St. Louis is an ensemble devoted to presenting historically informed performances of a diverse and wide-ranging repertory of seventeenth and eighteenth century music for voices and instruments.
