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Music Review: L.A. Chamber Orchestra explores Bach’s sensuous side

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It only comes once a year: the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra’s noted “Discover” concert program, a deeply researched, multifaceted presentation of a single masterwork explored through lecture, musical excerpts and a full performance of the featured piece, led by conductor and pianist Jeffrey Kahane, LACO’s leader of renown.

This year’s offering: J.S. Bach’s “Sleepers Awake” Cantata No. 140, at the Ambassador Auditorium in Pasadena on Saturday, January 23.

Kahane chose this Baroque jewel — based on the late 16th-century hymn, “Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme,” by German pastor Philipp Nicolai — to provide an introduction to the Bach cantatas, “an enormous body of incredible music,” he said, “that remains relatively little known to those concert-goers who don’t seek [it] out.”

Cantata No. 140, Kahane said, “is tremendously joyful and rich. It has great variety, and there’s a wonderful kind of orchestral virtuosity to part of it, as well as beautiful parts for the chorus and the solo singers.” (The piece also features “one of Bach’s greatest hits,” he said, referring to the “beautiful tune” heard in the cantata’s fourth movement, “which became quite famous. It was used for many years when I was growing up in L.A. as the theme for the classical music station KFAC.”)

The program will dig deep for aficionados, too. During Kahane’s examination of the work that will precede the full-length concert, the LACO, singers and choir will perform excerpts from lesser known Bach cantatas, including “a very significant chunk” of Cantata No. 4, “one of the Easter cantatas based on a hymn that goes back at least to the 12th century,” Kahane said.

“The earliest cantatas were not religious in nature. Many have mythological subjects, there are cantatas about love, and there even are some very funny cantatas. So there will be an opportunity for people to get a fairly broad historical context of what a cantata was in the 17th and 18th centuries, and even into the 19th century.”

While some tend to think of Bach as conservative, Kahane said, “in fact, he was very much interested in what was going on around him, and he took everything that he heard, from every national style, every genre of music, and incorporated it all to his purposes.” Kahane intends to “really zero in,” too, on what the cantata meant to Bach, noting that the composer wrote almost 300 cantatas for the church alone, of which about 200 survive. (“It’s sort of shocking to contemplate what was actually lost, but we have to be grateful for what we have.”)

Performing with the LACO will be the USC Thornton Chamber Singers, the Los Angeles Children’s Chorus and soloists Colin Ainsworth (tenor), Andrew Craig Brown (bass) — “two of the most wonderful young voices out there, both of whom have a particular affinity for Baroque music” — and soprano Kathryn Mueller, a late replacement for Teresa Wakim, who was forced to withdraw from the program due to illness.

“Teresa is fine,” Kahane assured, “but she had to take a couple of weeks off, so at the last moment we were incredibly fortunate” to get Mueller, “a wonderful young soprano, who lives in North Carolina.”

“And obviously, being a new faculty member at USC,” said Kahane, who joined the faculty of the university’s Thornton School of Music last fall, “it’s wonderful for me to work with the USC Thornton Chamber Singers, an elite group of singers. I haven’t worked with the Los Angeles Children’s Chorus before,” he added, “but of course they are renowned throughout the region for their superb singing.”

Previous “Discover” programs have featured Mozart’s Requiem Mass — “which was very much about the mystery of the Requiem, that it was left unfinished and all the issues that raised,” Kahane said — and Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4, “where we talked about music as narrative and mythology.”

But this year, for the first time in LACO’s annual “Discover” series, Kahane said, “we’re doing something that we’ve never done before, because we’ve never done a piece like this before.” Following the performance of the full cantata, he said, the audience will be given copies of the text of the final chorale and will be invited to sing a repeat performance of it with the orchestra and choir.

“It should be great fun,” Kahane said, while emphasizing how the cantata in Bach’s time would have been sung by a congregation with the choir as part of the church service. “This was very much part of the Lutheran idea,” he observed. “Martin Luther, whose theology plays such a powerful role in Bach’s own development as a composer and in his thinking, said that music was next to theology in its power to refresh the spirit. I wanted to give the audience a chance to experience a taste of what it might have been like.”

The program will end with a regular “Discover” feature: a Q&A session with Kahane and the audience, which can become quite lively, he confirmed. “We say it’ll be 20 minutes, and it usually ends up being 45.”

To prepare for the program, Kahane said, he read “hundreds and hundreds of pages of material ... and someone said that of all the works of Bach, there are very few that have the kind of sheer sensuous joy that this cantata does.

“And that’s what is fascinating about many of these pieces, he said, “the juxtaposition of this profound spirituality and religiosity with a great love of sensuous beauty. How Bach continually brings those two things together is something quite wonderful.”

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What: “Discover” Bach’s Cantata No. 140

Where: Ambassador Auditorium, 131 S. Saint John Avenue, Pasadena.

When: 8 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 23.

Tickets: $30

More info: (213) 622-7001, laco.org

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LYNNE HEFFLEY writes about theater and culture for Marquee.

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