Cantata No. 110, "Unser Mund sei voll Lachens," BWV 110 (BC A10)
The two Bach cantatas on this disc, one secular and one rather jocularly sacred, qualify as genuine Bach rarities. The larger of the two, Der Zufriedengestellte Aeolus (Aeolus with Mind Set at Rest), BWV 205 (1735), is the kind of work that would have seemed, and perhaps may still seem, intolerably trivial for those who think of Bach's music as a kind of spiritual pinnacle. For an age that likes to know what its artists ate for breakfast and to place them in their workaday worlds, however, it's both a delight and a goldmine ...
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The two Bach cantatas on this disc, one secular and one rather jocularly sacred, qualify as genuine Bach rarities. The larger of the two, Der Zufriedengestellte Aeolus (Aeolus with Mind Set at Rest), BWV 205 (1735), is the kind of work that would have seemed, and perhaps may still seem, intolerably trivial for those who think of Bach's music as a kind of spiritual pinnacle. For an age that likes to know what its artists ate for breakfast and to place them in their workaday worlds, however, it's both a delight and a goldmine. Thematically atypical even among Bach's secular choral pieces, it is a festival work honoring one Doktor August Friedrich Müller, a Leipzig professor, on the occasion of his name day. The text features a brief and entirely contrived disputation among four mythological figures: Aeolus (the wind god), Zephyrus (the god of warm breezes), Pomona (the goddess of fruit trees), and Pallas (otherwise known as Pallas Athena, the goddess of wisdom), together with a Chorus of Winds. In the...
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