Name: Bach’s B Minor Mass
Start: 2025-11-16T19:00:00+00:00
End: 2025-11-16T21:15:00+00:00
Location: Kings Hall Newcastle University

$Bach\u2019s B Minor Mass$

Bach’s B minor Mass is regarded by many as his finest work, although we have no record of it ever being performed in his lifetime. Two years ago, we explored some of the cantatas from which Bach borrowed music for the B minor. On Sunday 16 November at 7pm, we present the real thing.

The music contained in the Mass spans much of Bach’s career: the Kyrie and Gloria was sent to the Elector of Saxony in Dresden in 1733, in the vain hope the composer might be offered a post; the Sanctus was written for Christmas Day 1724 at Leipzig; while the Credo was probably compiled in the late 1740s.

Although Latin settings of the Kyrie and Gloria were sometimes sung in Lutheran services, there would not have been an opportunity to perform a full Latin mass in the Lutheran liturgy. It seems Bach saw this, like other late works such as The Art of Fugue, as more of an intellectual exercise than something likely to be performed complete.

Our performance brings together four of the foremost specialist Bach singers in the UK, along with the fine instrumentalists of Newcastle Baroque. Their period instruments make the most of Bach’s wonderfully varied orchestration, from the extraordinary sonorities of solo horn and bassoons in the Quoniam section to the celebratory trumpets and drums of joyful movements such as the Et Resurrexit.