Bach: Cantatas Volume 11 - Monteverdi Choir, John Eliot Gardiner

Joanne Lunn (soprano), Magdalena Kožená, Sara Mingardo (mezzos), William Towers (alto), Christoph Genz, Paul Agnew (tenors), Peter Harvey, Gotthold Schwarz (basses)

The Monteverdi Choir &The English Baroque Soloists, John Eliot Gardiner

Recorded live in Genoa (Cattedrale di San Lorenzo) and London (Old Royal Naval College Chapel, Greenwich), November 2000.

Cantatas for the twentieth and twenty-first Sunday after Trinity, recorded live in November 2000. John Eliot Gardiner, The Monteverdi Choir and The English Baroque Soloists head to Italy to give two concerts, one in the cathedral of San Lorenzo in Genoa and one the following day in the basilica of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome.

We join John Eliot and his forces for the first of these two concerts - a performance of three little-known secular-imaged cantatas in the stunning Gothic cathedral of San Lorenzo. The soloists are internationally acclaimed and include Magdalena Kožená, Sara Mingardo, Christoph Genz and Peter Harvey.

The concert opens with the solemn BWV 162 Ach! ich sehe, itzt, da ich zur Hochzeit gehe (Ah! I see, now, that I have gone to the feast), a cantata brought to life by Salomo Franck's strongly worded libretto. Bach thrives upon Franck's love of poetic compounds and polar opposites. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the opening bass aria where we get references to life and death, rays of heaven and fires of hell.

There then follows BWV 49 Ich geh und suche mit Verlangen (I go and seek with longing), a dialogue cantata geared towards creating an atmosphere depicting the beauty of the soul. In his booklet notes, Gardiner states that the best movement is the fourth which he believes to be "a kind of early version of Bernstein's 'I feel pretty.' "