Celestial Inventions and Divine Music
Inspired by the music of JS Bach, composer and intergalactic genius, Bach, the Universe and Everything is a concert season with a difference. It places his cantatas in the context of the amazing cosmic discoveries of the last 350 years.
Exploring the “Final Frontier” has drawn the most extraordinary ingenuity and inventions from humans in that time. This season we’ll cover topics from how the James Webb Space Telescope has enabled us to see back to the beginning of time to how the sea clocks of John Harrison solved the greatest scientific problem of his time.
Bach wrote over 200 church cantatas. In them we find Bach putting the full range of his creative flair to work to illuminate his faith for the congregation. In seeking to go beyond the frontier of the heavens to reach for the divine he also gifted us music that is intensely devotional yet also shines with brilliant musicianship. In the first few years after his move to Leipzig in 1723, Bach composed a cantata nearly every week for performance at services on Sundays – but this season we will also hear cantatas from earlier in his career in Weimar and later years in Leipzig.
