Program Notes
Cantata
Leipzig, where Bach was Kantor of St. Thomas Church and required to write for the University, church and other occasions, was a musically-conservative town but the quasi-operatic form cantatas took was not unfamiliar to Bach. He and his eldest son Friedemann would go over to nearby Dresden and its Italian opera house, “to hear the pretty tunes”...
The cantata ‘Sleepers, wake!’ is one of Johann Sebastian Bach's supreme masterpieces, a cantata without weaknesses, without a dull bar.