Artistic genius thrives on outrageous challenges. Soon after Johann Sebastian Bach became Kapellmeister at Leipzig in 1723, he set himself the task of providing a newly composed work—for instrumental ensemble, solo voices, and chorus—every Sunday and feast day of the ecclesiastical year.

It required an enormous degree of concentration, discipline, and dedication. Bach produced several complete annual “cycles” of these cantatas, which served as the principal liturgical music in Lutheran churches. Three of the four works presented by Early Music Vancouver’s Bach Cantata Project this Tuesday (December 19) at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts were written in 1724—just a part of the creative torrent released in the baroque composer by his move to Leipzig.

“Bach wrote the cantatas especially for the Sunday or holy day at which they were first performed, and their religious texts are appropriate,” says Marc Destrubé, director of the Bach Cantata Project, on the line from Paris. There, he’s just finished another large-scale project: a four-day concert marathon of performing all nine of Ludwig van Beethoven’s symphonies with the Orchestra of the 18th Century (of which he’s coconcertmaster). “But in the Christmas Oratorio—six cantatas composed as a set, of which we’re doing the fifth—he used music from some of his other works, often transforming it. He would take a piece and apply it to a different text in ways that are sometimes quite revelatory of his thinking. Studying Bach’s music is like opening one box of jewellery after another and being amazed at what he could do.

“This is our third year, and the [Christmas] concert has already become a bit of a tradition,” says Destrubé. “The original plan was to do the entire Christmas Oratorio, but when we sat down and worked out what was involved, it was too large a project to take on, initially anyway. We found other cantatas that are a bit more modest in scope but still grand enough to fill the hall, and appropriate to the season.”

The cantata project brings together four singers and an ensemble of string and continuo musicians, mostly from the Pacific Baroque Orchestra, including Destrubé on violin. The solo vocalists—soprano Suzie LeBlanc, alto Laura Pudwell, tenor Colin Balzer, and baritone Tyler Duncan—also sing the choral parts.

“There’s been recent research to show that Bach rarely had a choir in his performances of the cantatas, and that the local soloists also performed the function of the chorus,” says Destrubé. “So he didn’t have the big chorus we’re used to hearing. The wonderful thing about our singers is that they also work extremely well as an ensemble.”

For Destrubé, the genius of Bach’s music in the cantatas can be appreciated on many levels simultaneously. “There’s the cryptological, and the intellectual, but it also speaks so directly on an emotional level. Whenever I’m working on the cantatas I feel that they’re somehow making me a better person. There’s something very powerful about the music in that way.”