Monteverdi Choir: Bach - Aldeburgh Festival

An illuminating pair of concerts of Bach motets and solo violin works devised and performed by some of today’s leading Bach interpreters.

Bach’s miraculous motets are dazzling displays of his art, with the intricacies of the vocal lines emphasising the expressive power of the Lutheran texts, the still small quiet of chorales as their 19 contemplative emotional core. John Eliot Gardiner has referred to sections of Singet dem Herrn (the finale of this specially constructed sequence) as akin to an ‘aeronautical display... inscribing independent yet interlocking flight-paths responsive to thermal currents and the lines of free poetic text’. Setting a double choir of unaccompanied voices against the partitas and sonatas for solo violin seems to capture and enhance this perfect fusion of instrumental musical forms with vocal expression – a single instrument singing long arched melodies underpinned by the clarity of delicate counterpoint, the spirit of the dance never far away.

4pm (ends approx. 5.20pm, no interval)

6pm (ends approx. 7.25pm, no interval)