Musica Sequenza BACH The Silent Cantata

Johann Sebastian Bach has long been a guiding star for the bassoonist Burak Ozdemir. In his native Istanbul he regularly sang as a boy chorister in Bach’s choral works, and as a member of Early Music ensembles he later played the bassoon in all the composer’s great sacred vocal works, from the Passions to the Christmas oratorio.

With his album “The Silent Cantata”, Ozdemir pays his own very personal tribute to Bach. He has selected arias and chorales from 12 sacred cantatas that Bach wrote during his incredibly productive Leipzig years starting in 1723, and has rearranged them for bassoon and for the musicians of his Baroque ensemble Musica Sequenza.

In his programme of Bach cantatas, Burak Ozdemir plays all the vocal parts himself on the bassoon, from soprano through alto and tenor to the bass. He does not only adopt the role of soloist, but sometimes also performs a cantus firmus part such as is sung by the soprano, for instance, in the Bach original. Sensitive and with dignity, graceful and delicate, but also exuberantly happy – thus the bassoon moves without words through the sacred universe that Bach composed solely in the honour of the Lord. In the aria “Meine Seele wartet auf den Herrn”, taken from the cantata Aus der Tiefe rufe ich, Herr, zu dir BWV 131, the bassoon exudes lyrical inspiration to the swaying rhythms of the strings. Solemn and virtuoso at the same time, the bassoon warbles joyfully in the chorale “Allein zu Dir, Herr Jesu Christ” from the cantata of the same name, BWV 33. And in “Die Seele ruht in Jesu Händen” from Herr Jesu Christ, wahr’ Mensch und Gott, BWV 127, Ozdemir does more than evolve a positive sensuality in his arioso playing: the pizzicati and dabs of a portative organ even contribute a slight jazz groove. “This arrangement is the only one”, says Ozdemir, “where I give the bassoon more space to improvise. That’s why it seems very up-to-date.”

With “The Silent Cantata”, Ozdemir also creates a very special and entirely new spiritual listening experience; hence his choice of the somewhat paradoxical title for the album. “It’s this contradiction that appealed to me. The term ‘cantata’ immediately makes people think of singing, and there is really no such thing as a ‘silent cantata’.” None of the cantata texts appear on the pages of Ozdemir’s score, but their place is taken by the emotional power of music that conveys its message entirely without words. “I have a strong belief that Bach’s music can transport feelings and religious faith without any text, too.”

Burak Ozdemir has assembled the individual cantata movements to create a two-part narrative that comes close to a story of the Passion. To prepare for this, Ozdemir spend a long period of time making an intensive study of some 200 Bach arias. During this lengthy preparation phase, he focussed not so much on the music as on the texts, which he read care fully and finally chose for his “The Silent Cantata” project with the aim of giving shape to his ideal of a universal divine love. (musicasequenza.com)

Musica Sequenza VIVALDI The New Four Seasons

Composers have always been fascinated by nature and the elements, by thunder and lightning for example. Particularly in the baroque period, it was very much in vogue to depict all these natural phenomena in music. Nearly 300 hundred years later, music-lovers can enjoy a new version of the "Four Seasons". For the New Four Seasons Burak Ozdemir has written four poems which, unlike the sonnets that accompany the original Vivaldi concertos, describe not the seasons themselves, but the feelings of people today from one season to the next. Ozdemir’s seasons begin with Winter, where he has chosen four Vivaldi bassoon concertos to capture exactly the emotional worlds of his poems. After all, it’s not only nature itself that has changed radically, thanks to human influence, since Vivaldi’s time. As Burak Ozdemir himself adds, the clear boundaries that used to apply between the seasons of the year have long since become fluid: "We eat strawberries in winter, and fly to sunny climes to escape the autumn rainstorms."

WINTER
An ice-melting sunny dream,
Came through my window that night.
Warmer than it was,
Telling the story of overseas.
Like Butterflies…
SPRING
It’s the heat on my skin, red and more
Made my pulse rough, my heart sink.
The beat was up like a dance for the rain,
What’s missing there was the green
beauty. 
SUMMER
Stars above us, flaking bright lights…
In my ear are your whispering words.
The Northern wind catches my heart,
While chilling a hot summer night.
AUTUMN
Opening a new page of a book,
Not calm enough to finish it.
My coffee is cold, have no hands to cook.
It’s the “missing one red leave on a tree”
week.