The spot-lit miracle

Das Neugeborne Kindelein: Christmas Cantatas by Buxtehude, Telemann and J. S. Bach

Although we are deeply indebted to the light, because by means of it we can find our way, ply our tasks, read, distinguish one another; and yet for all that the vision of the light itself is more excellent and more beautiful than all these various uses of it. The contemplation of things as they are, without error or confusion, without substitution or imposture, is in itself a nobler thing than a whole harvest of invention.

 - Francis Bacon *

Old Master paintings on the covers of classical music discs can be a bit of cliché, but occasionally an especially relevant one is chosen, and that's definitely the case with this new Accent disc of Christmas cantatas from Baroque Germany, performed by Sigiswald Kuijken and La Petite Bande. The Adoration of the Shepherds by Gerrit van Honthorst, painted in 1622, and now in the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne, is an amazing presentation of the nativity. It's a Caravaggesque interpretation of John 1:9, "The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world." Sigiswald Kuijken has made that connection as well, in his excellent liner notes, which emphasize the  intimate atmosphere, but which, he says, "by no means excludes theatrical effects!" Of the beautiful Buxtehude In dulci jubilo he says:

... the fourth verse shines (as if under a halo) in a completely new glow, in that the two violins suddenly express the joy of the angels (“gaudia”) with their “ringing bells” in a frenzy of rapid movements.

Even in the early 18th century Christmas was a time to mix traditional music with newer, forward-looking sounds. I love Georg Philipp Telemann's archaic-sounding cantata Ein Kindelein so löbelich, TWV 9:5, from around 1720, but sounding at least a century older, at least until an Amen that sprouts Baroque curlicues around the more severe contrapuntal sounds of the stile antico. This is virtuoso composition that plays with styles in a kind of Enlightenment Post-Modernism. J. S. Bach's gorgeous cantata Ich freue mich in dir, BWV 133, from 1724, is a perfect example of how the great composer turned music into sounds of pure joy. Kuijken and La Petite Bande provide a joyful interpretation of the theatrical intimacy in this music, as apt an illustration of the show-stopping, spot-lit miracle that was the Nativity as the great painting of Gerrit van Honthorst.


* The quote from Francis Bacon, which is more or less contemporaneous to van Honthorst's painting and a century of more before the music on this disc, is from Temporis Masculus Partus, 'The Masculine Birth of Time', from 1605. It's well-known today, as you'll quickly see from a Google search, because the great photographer Dorothea Lange had the last sentence posted on her darkroom wall.

Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, Oklahoma, 1936

This disc will be released on October 19, 2018.