Bach Consort Leipzig

As early as 1950, at the Bachfest at Hamburg Paul Hindemith said regarding questions of performance practice: “If we are interested in performing his (Johann Sebastian Bach’s) music as he intended it to be, we will have to reconstruct the conditions for performance of his time.” In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, figural church music was usually performed by a small, often soloistic, ensemble even in large spaces. The singers, most of whom had undergone professional education, were used to melding themselves to each other within an ensemble. The practice of ensemble singing was highly valued: only the singer who could present himself as a virtuoso soloist in an aria and, in the like manner, could subordinate himself as the leader of a part in an ensemble was deemed to be perfect.

The principle of the concerto – the correspondence of soli and tutti – was seen as one of the essential elements of Baroque music making. These are the criteria against which the Bach Consort Leipzig measures its interpretations of Baroque music (and that of other periods). Their performance aims at a characteristically vocal sound-ideal, clear diction and rhetorical conciseness. The collaboration of soloists and ripienists (the singers of the tutti) provides a foreground for a colourful leading of harmony parts and melody which, together with stylistically precise instrumentalists, unfolds with dramatic expressivity and has its own, idiomatic effect on the listener.