"Coffee Cantata' by Philadelphia Bach Collegium (1st review)

For anyone who needs convincing that Bach was no stuffy old pedant, no better evidence exists than the two vocal works on the program that Matthew Glandorf conducted Friday night.

The formality of Bach's portraits, plus the intellectual intricacy of his religious music, don't leave the impression that Johann Sebastian was a fun guy. But these romantic and sensual secular compositions do.

In The Coffee Cantata, the soprano protagonist absolutely loves her coffee. And she loves, equally so, the idea of finding a man who will marry her. "If it could only happen soon," she sings rapturously, "going to bed with a lusty lover!" She jumps back and forth between her two passions: "Ah, coffee tastes sweeter than a thousand kisses."

Presaging Frank Loesser

Here is proof that Bach had a sense of humor. When he and his librettist, Christian Friedrich Henrici, wrote, "If three times a day I can't drink my cup of coffee, I would become like a dried-up piece of roast goat," they were presaging Frank Loesser's 1961 "Coffee Break" number from How to Succeed in Business ("If I can't take/ My coffee break/ Something within me dies").

This virtual comic operetta was written to be performed in Zimmerman's, Bach's favorite Leipzig coffee house. Fuddy-duddies of that time (c. 1732) were alarmed by caffeine's effect on young people; indeed, coffee wasn't accepted in German homes until the second half of the 18th Century. So The Coffee Cantata was Bach's endorsement of the counter-culture.

Baird's passion

Soprano Julianne Baird, the revered Bach specialist and music professor, brought a remarkable degree of passion to her subject. She also displayed an ethereal beauty, fluidity and accuracy of intonation. Baird communicated the humor of Bach's writing with a technique of throat articulation that Johann Agricola (the 16th-Century minister and writer of hymns) described as "a gentle laugh in the palate."

Her big scene in the cantata is an aria that fuses together a minuet and the "trio sonata" form, which includes two equal melodic lines. An obbligato, beautifully played on an early-period traverso flute by Stephen Zohn, was completely independent of the soprano, sometimes with flashy sections on its own.

It's stunning to see how much creativity and intricacy Bach put into this "pop" piece, treating it as seriously as his great religious works.

To open the program, Baird, Glandorf and the players of the Philadelphia Bach Collegium performed a Wedding Cantata with lilting romantic joy. Lyrics about horses darting across a re-awakened world were matched with exuberant music. Geoffrey Burgess's early-period oboe was a partner alongside Baird's singing about lips and breasts. The eight-person Collegium also played an arrangement of Bach's Orchestral Suite No. 2.♦


For a review of the Bach Festival by Tom Purdom, click here.