Cantatas, coffee and cake

A week in the life of JS Bach

Dunedin Consort
John Butt Director
Nicholas Phillipson Speaker
Falko Burkert Konditormeister

Programme includes:
Bach  Orchestral Suite No 1 in C
Bach  Coffee Cantata
Bach  Cantata ‘Ehre sei dir Gott’ and other works by Bach and his contemporaries

Gottfried Zimmermann’s Coffee House – a key institution in early 18th Century Leipzig – played a major role in Bach’s life. Here he composed for and directed Friday evening concerts with his Collegium Musicum in an informal, caffeine-stimulated atmosphere of artistic adventure and intellectual enquiry. It was a rich café culture where music, ideas and debate went together.

In this major event the Dunedin Consort explores Bach’s Leipzig through some of the music he composed for and performed at Zimmermann’s and at St Thomas’s Church.

His significance as a cultural figure then and now is debated by John Butt, one of the world’s leading Bach experts and distinguished historian Nicholas
Phillipson.

“The Dunedin players… capture what Butt praises as ‘carefree, joyous and spontaneous works’ …nothing short of sensational.”
Gramophone Magazine

“John Butt’s research and direction are an object lesson in musical study brought to compelling life.”
The Observer

To accompany your coffee we have commissioned East Lothian’s own German Master Cake Maker, Falko, to recreate some typical Leipzig cakes of the period. A fascinating new slant on great music and the culture that produced it.