The 'Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit' cantata, nicknamed 'Actus Tragicus' is the central piece of this evening's concert. Bach wrote the piece in 1708, an early cantata therefore. In line with the small instrumental setting, Philippe Pierlot chooses to allow the four solo voices sing the chorales. It is funeral music in which Johann Sebastian Bach meditates on the death of Christ and the ordinary mortal.
This concert also offers you the chance to enjoy some of the few extant works by Matthias Weckmann (1619-1674). This pupil of Schütz made an important contribution to musical life in North and Central Germany with his highly original religious work. Together with Christian Geist, Johann Heinrich Schmelzer, Nikolaus Bruhns and Melchior Hoffman, he formed the seventeenth-century musical breeding ground for the ecclesiastical cantatas written by the young Johann Sebastian Bach.