NEWS & FEATURES
Announcing our new Annual Season Ticket
Today we are launching our 2018/19 programme as we transition into the second year of our twelve-year cycle performing all of J.S. Bach’s choral works.
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Performer Focus: Charles Maxtone-Smith
Tell us a bit about yourself, and your training and career to date? My earliest musical training began as a member both of a local choral society and of the London Oratory Junior Choir, in which I became acquainted with Roman Catholic liturgy and music. My education...
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Bach’s Band: The Viola
OBS offers people like me the platform to work intensively on solo singing in a supportive environment, and I believe it will have a fundamental impact on how a whole generation of young Oxford singers will develop
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Bach Cantata: Gelobet sei der Herr, mein Gott (BWV 129)
The date of composition of this cantata is uncertain. It seems probable that Bach first performed it either during the 1726 Reformation Festival, which was always celebrated in Leipzig on 31st October, or on Trinity Sunday in the following year. Thereafter the piece took its place among the great chorale-based works of his 1724-25 cycle, where it replaced a non-chorale-based cantata, BWV 176.
Gelobet sei der Herr (Singing the Creed Joyfully)
Johann Olearius’ (1611-1684) hymn ‘Gelobet sei der Herr’ is a quintessential Lutheran chorale.
Johann Sebastian Bach: Cantata: Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit, BWV 106 (Actus Tragicus)
The cantata “Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit” (“God’s time is best”), dates from 1707 when Bach was, for a short while, organist of the Blasiuskirche at Mühlhausen.