Bach Weekend opens with a programme that features both Bach’s Cantate Burlesque (known as the Peasant Cantata) and his Coffee Cantata.

These extraordinary works, written in collaboration with Bach’s favourite librettist Picander, are nothing less than short comic operas. In the Cantate Burlesque, the themes of rural politics and bucolic sexuality form a heady mix within its bawdy text, while the Coffee Cantata explores the perils of coffee addiction, and the lengths that our heroine, Lieschen, will go to to secure a steady supply.

The performances will be dramatised and there will be English surtitles to show the quick-witted repartee of Picander’s poetry in real time. Charles Daniels will complete the programme with his reading of the beautiful tenor cantata ‘Ich armer Mensch, ich Sündenknecht’.