St Ann’s Church, Dublin
Bach
– Cantatas 40, 64, 91, 191
Few of us ever know exactly what we want to be doing in 10 years’ time but back in 2000 Lindsay Armstrong, artistic director of the Orchestra of St Cecilia (OSC), knew he wanted to be at the final concert of a complete cycle of the church cantatas of Johann Sebastian Bach. And there he was.
It was a fittingly grand finale to the decade-long series, with a pre-concert talk by the foremost living Bach scholar, Christoph Wolff, and four rousing Christmas compositions.
The Dublin Bach Singers met their Herculean agenda – five mighty choruses and seven chorales – with the dedicated vigour that has characterised the many contributions to the series from their conductor Blánaid Murphy.
Also bidding the series farewell were four of its most featured participants: soprano Lynda Lee, contralto Alison Browner, tenor Robin Tritschler and bass Jeffrey Ledwidge (who replaced the advertised Nigel Williams, another long-time regular). By way of valediction, the soloists joined the choir for the closing chorus of Cantata 191.
Without question this series has achieved exactly what it set out to do, which was to present all 200 church cantatas – many of them for the first time in Ireland – with local, mostly voluntary choirs, modern instruments, and guest conductors who are not necessarily specialists in Baroque performance practice.
If your taste for Bach depends on a chorus of trained, professional voices, on period instruments and pitch standards, and on an uncompromising determination to create the sound-word that seems to have been Bach’s ideal, then this was not the cantata cycle for you. The alternative, however, was your CD player.
That Ireland has finally had a live Bach cantata cycle at all is due partly to John Beckett’s legendary cantata performances, also given at St Ann’s a generation ago, but chiefly to the shrewd and steadfastly supported musical pragmatism of the OSC.
And it’s mooted that more – most likely a follow-up series of Bach’s 50 secular cantatas – is still to come.
Blánaid Murphy will conduct the OSC and combined choirs performing Bach’s St Matthew Passion at the Pro-Cathedral, Dublin, on March 21
