Launched as recently as January, the Seattle Bach Festival is already becoming a force in the Pacific Northwest’s Early Music landscape. Founded and directed by Baroque violinist Tekla Cunningham – long a leading presence in that scene – SBF brings together many of the region’s foremost period musicians with a shared conviction of the role Bach and his contemporaries can play in rekindling community spirit, especially as an antidote to the still-lingering post-pandemic disconnection.
SBF’s programming has already shown striking range and imagination, from choral grandeur to introspective solo performances, all threaded by an undercurrent of longing for connection between musicians and audience. This concert, titled ‘The Eloquent Oboe’, was no exception: a thoughtfully conceived program anchored around Bach’s intimately scored solo cantatas with oboe obbligato.
Before the voices entered, organist Christian Broughton established the afternoon’s expressive frame with Bach’s Concerto in G major (BWV 592), one of a group of transcriptions of instrumental concertos for solo organ the composer undertook during his early Weimar years. The piece was adapted – and elaborated – from a concerto by the gifted Prince Johann Ernst, the son of Bach’s Weimar employer, who died at 18. Broughton summoned the buoyant energy of its outer movements with sonorous command and rhythmic vitality.
The moodily dreamlike Adagio bridging them offered a moment of reflective stillness that seemed to anticipate the program’s lineup of cantatas from Bach’s first Leipzig decade, each turning inward through voice and breath to offer solace in the face of mortality.
Baroque oboist Debra Nagy, a core member of the Seattle Bach Festival Orchestra, stepped into the spotlight with soprano Hannah De Priest and baritone Tyler Duncan, while Cunningham led from the violin. They were joined by a band of SBF regulars: bassoonist Anna Marsh, violinists Chloe Meyers and Anna Okada, violist Stef Creswell, cellist William Skeen, bassist Ross Gilliland, and organist/harpsichordist Henry Lebedinsky.
In Ich bin vergnügt mit meinem Glücke (BWV 84), De Priest’s bright, pliant soprano intertwined with Nagy’s plaintive oboe, at times as if they were sharing and extending each other’s breath. Baritone Tyler Duncan took on the extensive solo role in Ich habe genug (BWV 82), a cantata built on one of Bach’s most moving paradoxes: music of radiant beauty devoted to the longing for death. Duncan captured both sides of that tension – the sense of peace never quite masking a quiet ache beneath. The opening aria revealed the agility of his baritone and the clarity of his declamation, while the long ‘slumber aria’, “Schlummert ein, ihr matten Augen”, unfolded in a spell of suspended stillness against the unusually low writing for the strings.
De Priest and Duncan joined in Liebster Jesu, mein Verlangen (BWV 32), a dialogue cantata written for the first Sunday after Epiphany. De Priest’s seraphically animated soprano contrasted to telling dramatic effect with Duncan’s steadiness in a tender musical exchange between Soul and Jesus. Her tone had an almost giddy brightness in its attention to Bach’s word painting; his imparted quiet assurance in the aria “Hier, in meines Vaters Stätte”, where Cunningham’s violin obbligato provided elegant counterpoint.
Though these cantatas turn inward toward private spiritual reflection, the performance reinforced their roots in communal worship by inviting the audience to join in singing the closing chorales of BWV 84 and 32, which were printed in the program, a simple gesture that restored something of Bach’s original participatory spirit.
Along the way, the Concerto for oboe, violin and string orchestra in C minor (BWV 1060R) served as a counterpart to the vocal works, with Nagy and Cunningham emerging as wordless singers in their own right. I was reminded of a remarkable new work – Matthew Aucoin’s ‘vocal symphony’ Music for New Bodies, performed recently in Seattle – which likewise gives the oboe a voice at the threshold of speech, tracing emotion beyond words.
