Sacred music for crowned heads in Eisenach and Dresden – from the two kings of church cantatas. An impressive opening concert and a meeting up with two of the best-known Bach Festival’s top ensembles.

With his first year of cantatas created for the Eisenach court in 1710, Telemann devised a new form of church cantata: sequences of recitatives and arias as in the opera combined with words from the Bible and Protestant hymns were now features of sacred music. Bach, at this time in service to the court in Weimar and in close contact with Telemann, must have taken a keen interest and profited richly in his Leipzig cantatas.