Of Bach's small collection of secular cantatas, Der Streit zwischen Phoebus und Pan (The Contest Between Phoebus and Pan) comes closest to being the opera that Bach never wrote, a lack that is purely a matter of historical accident, for if he had been hired by a leading noble court such as that at Dresden, there would be plenty of them. It would be an abstract opera, with its musical competition between elevated Phoebus and flute-wielding nature-lover Pan, complete with commentary from their partisans, but abstraction was ...
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Of Bach's small collection of secular cantatas, Der Streit zwischen Phoebus und Pan (The Contest Between Phoebus and Pan) comes closest to being the opera that Bach never wrote, a lack that is purely a matter of historical accident, for if he had been hired by a leading noble court such as that at Dresden, there would be plenty of them. It would be an abstract opera, with its musical competition between elevated Phoebus and flute-wielding nature-lover Pan, complete with commentary from their partisans, but abstraction was in no way beyond the norm for Baroque court entertainments, and the music, with trumpets in the orchestra, is in Bach's best festive mode. The chief novelty of this performance is that conductor Hansjörg Albrecht has moved the work even closer to the realm of opera by giving it a three-movement "overture," curtain-raiser, and curtain-dropper, drawn from other secular cantatas. This may seem startling, but Bach recycled already written music all the time, and it's hard to imagine that...
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