Bach Cantatas by Herreweghe

Karl Richter got me into Bach cantatas. Those Archive editions from the early seventies — bluey-green boxes stacked on the shelf, each one a kind of promise — shaped my ears in ways I’m still sorting out decades later. I’ve since replaced the LPs with CDs, jettisoned a few, kept what mattered. Richter remains my touchstone, which tells you something. I also prefer Bach on the piano to the harpsichord, so readers may calibrate my authority accordingly.

None of which is to dismiss what Philippe Herreweghe has built over forty-some years of Bach rendition. He was among the first conductors to make historically informed practice feel like revelation rather than archaeology — and that distinction matters enormously. My own acquaintance with him deepened through his 2001 album of the St. John Passion, which stopped me cold. The transparency. The way grief moved through the ensemble like weather.

The four cantatas gathered here — BWV 25, 46, 105, and 138 — all date from the summer and early autumn of 1723, Bach’s first year at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig. July through September. He had committed himself to supplying new music for the Sundays and feast days of the liturgical calendar, and the pace was punishing. What’s remarkable isn’t just that he kept up — it’s that he kept thinking.

The variety of formal construction across these four works deserves more attention than it usually gets. BWV 25, “Es ist nichts Gesundes an meinem Leibe“ (“There is no soundness in my flesh”), composed for the Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity, moves through the familiar architecture: opening chorus, recitative, aria, recitative, aria, closing chorale. Solid. Purposeful. But turn to BWV 138, “Warum betrübst du dich, mein Herz“ (“Why do you trouble yourself, my heart”), written for the very next Sunday, and Bach has done something structurally stranger — opening with a tenor recitative that bleeds directly into choral response, the bass entering almost immediately after in recitative again. There’s only a single aria in the whole work, and it belongs to the bass. The effect is compressed, almost urgent, as if the theological argument won’t wait for conventional niceties.

Instrumentation shifts just as restlessly. BWV 105 and 138 deploy two oboes doubling an oboe d’amore, with BWV 105 adding a horn — that particular combination produces a reedy, slightly melancholy bloom that suits the penitential texts perfectly. BWV 46 reaches for pairs of recorders and oboes da caccia, an altogether more pastoral color. Then BWV 25 goes furthest: three recorders, two oboes, and — this is the startling bit — a four-part ensemble of cornett and three trombones, instruments Bach typically reserved for chorale reinforcement or ceremonial gravity. Their presence here darkens the sonic atmosphere considerably, like clouds moving across a late-summer afternoon.

Herreweghe understands all of this. He doesn’t impose a single interpretive template across the four works; he lets each cantata find its own weight, its own pace. His ensemble playing is characteristically clean without being antiseptic — there’s still grit in the strings, still a slight edge in the wind choir that reminds you these are working instruments, not museum pieces. The soloists are well-matched, the bass especially compelling in that BWV 138 aria, the voice carrying a quality of resignation that feels genuinely inhabited rather than performed.

Is this the definitive account? That’s probably the wrong question. Herreweghe has recorded much of this repertoire before, and the differences between versions are sometimes subtle enough to require the kind of obsessive comparison that serves critics better than listeners. What I can say is that this disc makes the music feel necessary — which, after all these years, is what I still want from Bach. The cantatas of summer 1723 were written under pressure, for a specific congregation, on a deadline no modern composer would accept. Herreweghe honors that urgency. He doesn’t smooth it away.