January 5: Cantatas 202, 32, 84 (Emmanuel Music)

Time for more singing. Emmanuel Music is the same group that performed behind Lorraine Hunt Lieberson from my first post, and the cantatas performed on this record feature the same excellent oboist Peggy Pearson.

I had a tougher time with this recording. Pearson’s playing is strong, but the recording suffers from suboptimal mixing, and the microphone picks up the keys of her oboe clicking away. (I’m fine with some of this acoustic reality in an intimate record, and it maybe feels more in place with saxophone in a jazz context, but this is distracting to me, from the opening of BWV 202.)

Often the orchestra doesn’t quite come together. The cellist and the organist want to be in different bands:

My favorite track from this collection is the final movement from BWV 84 for four voices and orchestra. It’s less than a minute long and lovely. The title is Ich leb indes in dir vergnüget und sterb ohn alle Kümmernis (“Meanwhile, I live contented in You and die without any trouble.”) The final lyric is translated as “you will make my end a good one,” and the final chord switches from minor to major on the word “good” (gut, actually, of course). I learned in my music theory class in high school that this minor to major move on the last note is called the “Picardy third,” trivia that has stuck with me for 28 years…