The devotion of a Dublin orchestra means the city is one of the few places to hear the composer's complete Church Cantatas, writes Eileen Battersby
On January 23rd, a Sunday, a baroque orchestra of strings, oboes, horns, trumpet and organ, with choir and soloists, will gather in a Dublin church to perform music written between 1724 and 1729 by a harassed German cantor and organist. It is the first of six concerts this year, themselves the fifth series in a 10-year project consisting of 60 concerts. The music is part of a great church-cantata cycle and the composer none other than Johann Sebastian Bach.
"Many of these cantatas have never been performed in Ireland," says Lindsay Armstrong of the Orchestra of St Cecilia, which is presenting the project. "Most might never be performed again. This is why I feel our project is so important."
Important and inspired. While recovering from an operation in 2000, the year of Bachfest which marked the 250th anniversary of the composer's death, Armstrong was reflecting on the ambition of the English conductor John Eliot Gardiner to perform each of the surviving cantatas in churches across Europe, before finishing in New York, within the anniversary year.
"I thought, why can't we do them all as well, but not in the one year," recalls Armstrong, who is the orchestra's manager. He wanted to approach them at a slower pace, plotted out over 10 years and, like Eliot Gardiner, following the order of the church year. The project, which has now reached the halfway point, has won solid support from outstanding musicians such as the German-based Irish contralto Alison Browner and the Irish tenor Robin Tritschler, who have performed in most of the concerts.
The venue, St Ann's Church on Dawson Street in Dublin, is also important. Completed in 1723, the year Bach arrived at St Thomas's Church in Leipzig, it marks a symbolic historical connection. Composing the Church Cantatas, each of which is a self-contained drama, offering strong arias and duets for singers and solo parts for instrumentalists, was a routine weekly part of Bach's duties as cantor. Each Sunday St Thomas's resounded with a cantata written for the day by the composer, who also directed the choir and orchestra. Now St Thomas's is one of the few places in which one may expect to hear the pieces in their liturgical setting.
Bach's Church Cantatas, of which about 200 of 300 or more survive, form yet another element of a towering body of work that includes orchestral suites, concertos and sonatas for a range of instruments, including cello, violin, oboe, organ (for which he composed more than 300 works), harpsichord and, of course, the human voice.
The choral works alone defined the evolution of church music by excitingly deferring to north German tradition while introducing Italianate expression and innovation.
No other composer, not even giants of the stature of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert or Stravinsky, can match the musical achievement of Bach, who spent most of his 65 years in central Germany as a working musician, teacher and thorn in the side of the Church and civic establishment.
Unlike his near contemporary Handel, a month his senior and a fêted cosmopolitan based in London for 30 years, Bach never had an easy life. His appointment as Thomascantor, in Leipzig in 1723, as the sixth choice for the post, was fraught with tension. Politics as much as musical talent dictated. The council had wanted Telemann, but such were the bickering and delays that he lost interest. Bach was 38 at the time and had already composed about 30 cantatas, initially in Arnstadt and Mülhausen, where he took a traditional approach. By 1708 Bach had secured an appointment in Weimar, where he was alerted to the more colourful style of Italian composers such as Vivaldi. It was an important period in his compositional development.
Ask any musician to discuss Bach and the response is usually shaped by love. Bach generates warmth because his music, for all its demanding technical perfection, is utterly human. "He loved his fellow man and woman and understood them," says Armstrong. "He is also dealing with the great eternal realities of human existence - life, death, sorrow, sin, guilt, happiness, forgiveness, redemption, contemplation and gaiety - all of which are reflected and explored within the cantatas and are imbued with a deep spirituality."
He continues: "He really believed that the ultimate goal of all music is the praise of God and the re-creation of the soul. These cantatas are about all of this. There is such a feeling of empathy, and yet, while Bach was a very devout person, he was no prude: he had a definitive sense of humour, was fond of his glass of beer or wine and was quite capable of setting earthy and racy words to music."
Armstrong, who trained as an oboist and then became the first manager of the National Concert Hall and, in 1982, the first director of the Royal Irish Academy of Music, came to Bach's music through his teacher, the late Derek Bell, harpist with The Chieftains. "He gave me a complete musical education, starting with the music of Bach."
The oboe lesson, which always took place in Bell's Belfast home, lasted a good hour, "but the rest of the time, which would span most of Saturday, he played the piano to me, taking me through the keyboard repertoire of the great classical and romantic composers. By the time I was 17 I had more than a nodding acquaintance of then obscure Russian composers such as Scriabin and Metner".
For Armstrong, who was born in Belfast in 1942 and raised in Lisburn, "the son of a very musical mother who played the piano", music was not an immediate obsession. "When I was eight or nine I was sent off to piano lessons, but I was far more interested in playing cricket than in practising." He always liked music, however. By the age of 15 this liking had developed further thanks to listening to live performances, such as the BBC Proms from the Royal Albert Hall, in London, on the radio.
His broad knowledge of music was noticed by the music master at Friends' School, in Lisburn, a man called Robert Megraw, who presented Armstrong with the Quaker school's only oboe and encouraged him to have a go. "It was the cheapest possible oboe you could buy in 1957, but somehow I managed to make some kind of sound on it. And Mr Megraw arranged for me to go to Derek Bell, who was then a young musician just back from his studies in London."
After three years study with Bell, Armstrong was awarded a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music in London. Only two years into his studies there, he auditioned in 1963, aged 21, for an oboe position in what is now the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, in Dublin, and was offered the position. It was the beginning of a 15-year relationship with the orchestra.
During this time he became involved with the founding of the New Irish Chamber Orchestra in 1970. His intensive playing of Bach began two years later, when the distinguished harpsichordist John Beckett began his celebrated cantata series at St Ann's. Beckett, a baroque pioneer, used the New Irish Chamber Orchestra for all of the performances, featuring about 65 cantatas between 1972 and 1981. "John Beckett brought to Irish musicians and audiences a real appreciation of baroque style and practice. He opened our senses to the wonderful music contained in the cantatas. We all owe him a deep musical and artistic debt."
Irish audiences should also be thinking of thanking Armstrong for having the imagination and energy to guide the cantata series. The St Cecilia project is obviously not as high profile as Eliot Gardiner's, which acquired the glamour of being a race against time and benefited to some extent from the fame of its flamboyant conductor. The Orchestra of St Cecilia uses several guest conductors and invited choirs, and although several of the soloists have become regulars the only high-profile individual is Bach himself.
Only about half a dozen recordings of the series have been completed. Deutsche Grammophonabandoned its much-vaunted contract to record Eliot Gardiner's anniversary-year performances for commercial reasons, prompting the conductor, who holds the rights to the performance tapes, to launch his own label. The first two recordings will be available soon.
Meanwhile, Ton Koopman has reached volume 17 of a projected 20- volume studio series of the cantatas, conducting the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra & Choir. Bach Collegium Japan, under Masaaki Suzuki, has also yet to finish recording.
For Armstrong and his team, along with the obvious pleasure, there are the usual financial pressures. "We are grateful to Dublin City Council, which has supported us from the outset [ the Davy stockbrokerage is also sponsoring the fifth series], but are disappointed that the Arts Council has so far refused funding."
The musicians and singers will be taking their place in a church, on a Sunday. Although they will be performing up to three cantatas in a concert setting rather than within a church service, they are ever mindful of Bach's enduring legacy.
