Harpsichordist Elina Albach

The global situation is extremely tense due to various wars and provocations. First of all, on a fundamental level: should Early Music concerts respond to these issues, or rather offer a distraction through beautiful music?

Even the title of our concert, »What Do I Ask of the World?« and some of the selected works suggest that we had been pondering in advance how (Baroque) music and concerts can engage with social debates and the issues of our time. Ideally, we can achieve both: listeners who are longing for distraction and a break can lose themselves entirely in the music and need not dwell on the content. Visitors who would like to delve deeper into the whirlwind of ideas are warmly invited to do so and will discover further layers beyond the music itself. For me personally, it is becoming increasingly unthinkable to devise programmes or concepts that lack any social or political relevance or contextualisation. The major crises of our time – ranging from the climate crisis to politically contentious decisions that have concrete repercussions for the cultural scene and the lived reality of many artists and listeners – must be reflected in art and culture; otherwise, as artists, we cannot claim public funding nor lay claim to the often-discussed supposed systemic relevance.

For the festival’s prologue with your ensemble Continuum, you have compiled individual movements from Bach cantatas dating from 1725 into a pastiche. What were your guiding principles in making this selection?

First of all, the greatest difficulty in making the selection was deciding which pieces we had to leave out. In 1725, Bach set to music a seemingly endless range of emotions, themes and texts – so it was a difficult decision for us. Taking the eponymous cantata Was frag ich nach der Welt (»What Do I Ask of the World?«) (composed as early as 1724, but introducing the 1725 cycle of chorale cantatas) as our starting point, we then set out to find arias and choruses that particularly resonated with the themes of the text. Crucial to this selection are the two recitatives for tenor and bass from the title cantata, which have significantly influenced the direction and dramaturgy.

The texts to which Bach set music in his cantatas are often dismissed as pompous and Baroque. Might these poems, 300 years later, perhaps still have something to say to us today, with our global problems?

Certainly, familiarity with Protestant church music from the 17th and 18th centuries is a decisive advantage when it comes to identifying with parts of the texts or at least being able to contextualise them. However, I find, for example, the opening of the chorale from our central cantata very interesting: »Why should I care for the world! In the blink of an eye it must vanish; its splendour cannot hold back even pale death. Possessions must pass away, and all pleasure fades; if only Jesus remains with me: What do I ask of the world!« Suppose one were to replace »Jesus« with a contemporary, secular noun or another person; people today would certainly be able to identify with the content of this verse.

The Bach programme is complemented by Caroline Shaw’s Concerto for Harpsichord. Could you describe this work and its connection to Bach in a little more detail?

Caroline Shaw, one of the most important contemporary composers, references Johann Sebastian Bach in many of her works. The inspiration for this concerto came during a road trip across the USA, whilst she spent hours listening to Bach’s harpsichord concertos. In other works, she quotes Bach’s chord progressions or chorales more directly (e.g. O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden in her string quartet Punctum), that is not the case here. However, she gives the harpsichordist plenty of freedom to imitate Bach’s harpsichord playing style using arpeggios and short improvisations – or even to introduce a style entirely of one’s own. The three movements are highly entertaining and written in a chamber-music style. In our programme, they guide the audience through the dramaturgy of the first half of the concert and repeatedly provide a touch of lightness or brief interludes amidst the profound Bach arias.

You are known for creating and performing your own arrangements of Baroque music. How have you adapted the music, and which instruments – and thus timbres – have you added?

For this programme, I have expanded our core group slightly. We are playing with a larger instrumental line-up than in previous arrangements, in order to have a wider range of timbres and possibilities. Alongside the singers (soprano, alto, tenor, bass), we have typical Baroque-era instruments such as strings and the transverse flute. These are complemented by unexpected new and old instruments, such as the viola da gamba and the cornetto, as well as the accordion and electric guitar. Each of the musicians brings their own unique expertise and sonic world to the performance. Whilst we will perform the Shaw harpsichord concerto unaltered, with strings and harpsichord, the Bach arias and choruses will receive new arrangements depending on their content and emotional impact. In this regard, it is particularly important to me never to alter the musical score itself, but rather to try to emphasise the message even more using the means at our disposal. This is an approach that Bach himself constantly employed in his parodic method and which is historically highly accurate. For me, this work always involves delving particularly deeply into the musical score and its thematic message – an engagement with the material that I would always wish for and which will hopefully result in the audience enjoying a carefully curated opening night!