Double rations

I mentioned Bach's cantatas on March 18th 2012 in the other place, the main drift being that we had little to do with them, despite owning a box full.

But this week, due to a quirk in the timetable, we have been to two cantata concerts.

The first was given by the Ripieno Choir in the handsome Weston Green church near Esher - a newish, fairly austere church which we thought well suited to this north German, Lutheran sort of music. They fielded a mixed choir of around 30 voices, backed by a small orchestra (the Chameleon Arts Baroque Ensemble) mainly playing instruments of the time of composition, including no less than three sorts of antique oboe, two of which looked like large recorders and one like the horn of a Poirot car. They offered a medley, drawing bits from from across the liturgical year, generally two or three bits  from each of the cantatas selected. All rather good, although slightly damaged by there being clapping at the end of each cantata, which made for rather more clapping than I like - or that BH thought was appropriate for church music in a church.

There was then a period of revision during which we read about the difference between a cantata and a sonata and between an aria and a recitative. I was also very impressed by the rendering the of the first aria of cantata 82 offered by Natalie Dessay and YouTube; a cantata which might also be termed a death song.

The second was given by members of the London Bach Singers in the Purcell Room, backed by another small orchestra (the Feinstein Ensemble), this last very much the same sort of thing as the first, but including more unusual violins and an antique recorder as well as an antique oboe. They offered four complete cantatas, mostly in the form of a sole singer with orchestral backing. (Cantata 82 was here given by a bass rather than a soprano - which made a lot of difference. Maybe one of the different versions referred to in the programme notes). So a quite different format from that offered by the Ripieno Choir, and for us, a far more impressive experience. A properly sacred rendering of sacred music, albeit in a secular space, from a time which I now suspect to be the tipping point between the time when serious music (in the west of Europe) was mainly sacred to that when serious music was mainly secular, a tipping comparable to the similar, rather earlier, shift in painting.

On the way home, the thoughtful off license near platform 1 at Waterloo gave me a plastic glass with which to drink my 2 for £5.50 quarter bottles of red, despite consumption being illegal and we were further entertained by conversation with a visually handicapped inhabitant of Swail House who was happy to tell us about some of the minutiae of blind life and blind dogs.

Home, to find a large frog on our front verge. We decided to leave it to its own devices, to let nature take its course, be that to the stomach of a passing fox or to tadpoles.