Bach: Cantatas, Vol. 24 - BWV 12, 103, 108, 117, 146, 166

The Monteverdi Choir and its founder, Sir John Eliot Gardiner, have towered over the world of early music ever since Gardiner, then a student at Cambridge, brought them together in 1964 for a performance of Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610. They’ve since performed and recorded (and often re-recorded) almost every major choral work of the Baroque and classical periods. In 2000, to celebrate the new millennium, they pulled off the extraordinary feat of singing almost all of J. S. Bach’s 200 surviving sacred cantatas in different, mainly European venues on the holy days for which they were written. This volume, from the subsequently issued live recordings, showcases the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists in top form, such as in the overlapping lines of the mournful first choral movement of Bach’s 1714 cantata Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen (“Weeping, lamentation, worry, despair”) or in any of the resolute chorales that typically round off the works.