07 Jul 2009

In Performance: Bach Festival opens

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/the-classical-beat/2009/07/in_performance_bach_festival_o.html

By Joan Reinthaler [Washington Post, 7 July 2009]

The “Coffee Cantata” and the “Peasant Cantata” were the closest Bach ever came to dabbling in opera. Spoofs on cultural foibles of 18th-century Germany, they are full of the upbeat gaiety that infects settings of even some of his most didactic texts.