Kantaten für Hamburg

In 1768, shortly after his 54th birthday Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach left Berlin and took up the post of Music Director of Hamburg, which had become vacant when his godfather Georg Friedrich Teleman had died the year before. The two cantatas "Mache dich auf, werde Licht" H 821h (1777) and "Danket dem Herrn" H824e (1785), recorded here for the first time, were written for sacral celebrations outside regular church services. The former work, an introductory piece, was heard at the induction ceremony of a new minister. According to Bach's widow the second cantata is "a hymn of thanks for friendship, a birthday composition". Both cantatas are in two parts: the opening part dedicated to God's praise in general and the second part - after the sermon - dedicated to the special occasion in question (welcoming the new minister, glorifying friendship and celebrating the particular birthday.

Both works combine Old Testament psalmody with Protestant chorale verses and juxtapose contemporary dance music with strange historicism and very particular pre-romantic a capella movements.

In these works Carl Philipp Emanue Bach may seem like a wanderer between two worlds. The apparantly unconcerned combination of the profane and everyday with the subtle and sublime however shows him unmistakably to be a contemporary of Viennese classical music.

Simone Kermes, soprano; Lydia Vierlinger, alto; Markus Schäfer, tenor; Klaus Mertens, bass.
Wiener Kammerchor, Wiener Akademie, conductor: Martin Haselböck.