Johann Sebastian Bach

The motet was the most important form of polyphonic vocal music throughout Europe during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and it remained a major idiom for baroque composers, particularly in Germany. Johann Sebastian Bach’s motets are regarded as crowning achievement of the form. Each is like a small gem, compact, multifaceted, and brilliant. Demanding works of vocal virtuosity, subtlety, and fervor, they are reckoned among the finest of Bach’s choral oeuvre and deserve to be much better known. Because of their enormous difficulties, however, they are rarely performed, even as individual works.

To do justice to their complex and shifting textures, director David Babbitt has come up with the ingenious solution of assigning the motets’ various sections to different ensembles of the choir. Some of the more delicate fugal sections, for instance, will be performed by the Bach Choir’s chamber group, Concentus, which has earned a reputation for sensitive, precise and compassionate renditions of sacred music from the German baroque. The chorales, on the other hand, will be sung by the choir in full force. This original format, based on Mr. Babbitt’s long experience with antiphonal performance practice, will allow the choir to express the full range of emotions embedded in the complex baroque rhetoric of these works—a rhetoric and an aesthetic which above all is dedicated to portraying extremes of thought and feeling.