Bach: Advent Cantatas

Waiting for the Lord. Surely one of the greatest gifts the Lutheran Church ever made to music was to have charged Bach with the duty of producing a cantata for every week of the year! He left us no fewer than three for the first Sunday in Advent alone, composed between 1714 (at Weimar) and 1724-31 (at Leipzig). They are inspired in very different ways by Luther's original chorale; it is as if all of Baroque Germany is contained between the sobriety of BWV 61 and the ambitious

frescoes of BWV 36 and 62...