The All Saints choir joins the Winnipeg Baroque Festival with a performance of Bach’s Ascension Oratorio, with soloists and orchestra, conducted by Dietrich Bartel. This concert is pay-what-you-can.
Parking is available at Canada Life. More information about
parking and accessibility is available at https://www.allsaintswinnipeg.ca/contact.
Be sure to visit winnipegbaroquefestival.com for the full concert line-up.
Johann Sebastian Bach: Ascension Oratorio, BWV 11
Bach spent all of his life writing music for the church. Beginning with one of his earliest appointments in Weimar when he was 23 years old, Bach began composing cycles of cantatas, one for each Sunday and Festival Day of the church year, explaining that it was his “ultimate goal” was to work “toward a well-regulated church music, to the glory of God.” A church cantata focused on the Gospel reading for the Sunday or Feast Day, with a libretto usually written by a poet-theologian, consisting of a mixture of scripture, poetry, and chorale texts.
At first, Bach wrote a cantata a month, planning to complete a cycle in 4 years. This was followed by a few years of not writing any cantatas, as he procured a position in Cöthen where no church music was required. But upon moving to Leipzig and the Thomaskirche in 1723, cantata writing resumed, in earnest: one cantata a week for the next two years, and then slowing down a bit in following years. By the end of the 1720s Bach had completed five complete cycles (only the equivalent of three cycles are extant today), and had therefore a great deal of music to choose from for his Sunday services, in addition to the music of other composers. The last two decades of his life were devoted to larger projects: larger collections of organ and harpsichord music, final revisions to his Easter Oratorio and the Passions, and the composition of the B Minor Mass, the Christmas Oratorio, and, closely following on the completion of that, the Ascension Oratorio.
During all these years, Bach also had to supply cantatas for secular celebrations, such as royal birthdays, weddings, school celebrations, and city election celebrations. Bach put as much energy and imagination into these compositions as he did for his church music, in spite of the fact that such compositions would only get one performance. Not surprisingly, Bach decided to repurpose some of that music, and incorporate it into his church music. Much of the music of the later oratorios and the B Minor Mass is repurposed, and sometimes more than once, as is the case with the Ascension Oratorio alto aria, which was repurposed from an earlier secular, and reappears in the Agnus Dei of the Mass in B Minor.
The Ascension story, taken from the gospels of Mark and Luke, and the Acts of the Apostles, is narrated by the tenor Evangelist, like in the Passions and the Christmas Oratorio. The accompanied recitatives are both accompanied by a pair of flutes, emphasizing the calm almost pastoral character of the piece. Opening and closing choruses, the final one based on a chorale, are triumphant and jubilant, with full orchestra including trumpets and drums. The two arias, on the other hand, are marked first by melancholy (alto) and then by contentment (soprano), as the believer comes to terms with Jesus’ departure. The soprano aria is particularly interesting: Bach does not supply a bass line, only upper voices, painting a picture of Jesus’ feet having “left the ground.”