Bach, the Universe and Everything: How to be an Astronaut and Other Space Jobs.
MUSIC & GUEST ARTISTS
TALLIS If Ye Love Me
JS BACH Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit (Actus Tragicus), BWV 106 (God’s time is the very best time)
Madison Nonoa soprano
Helen Charlston alto
Jeremy Budd tenor
Dominic Sedgwick bass
with
Sheila Kanani guest speaker
Dr Sheila Kanani will discuss jobs in the space sector ranging from astronaut to space food taster and showcase some amazing space spin-off technologies that are arguably more important down on Earth than they are in space!
Our final canata returns to the big theme of this season: what is our place in the history of the universe? Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit seems to have been written as a funeral ode, but no-one knows who it was for. From the opening sonatina for two recorders to the closing chorus, it is a work of transcendent beauty and peace that affirms the qualities of confidence and inner calm.
Sheila Kanani is one of the UK’s most innovative astronomy communicators through her work for the Royal Astronomical Society, as a comedian and speaker, and as an author of children’s books.
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Bach, the Universe and Everything is a concert series with a difference. Guided by the work of JS Bach, composer and intergalactic genius, our mission is to explore the human desire to better understand our place in the cosmos through his 200 cantatas.
Each concert is built around a Bach cantata and a talk from a guest speaker, alongside choral and instrumental music by other baroque and renaissance composers. The concert lasts approximately one hour.
In 2022-23 we look to the stars as six eminent scientists, writers and broadcasters explore why humans started looking beyond our planet in the first place, space exploration and what lessons we can learn for life on Earth from future discoveries.
"He was wrong to think he could now forget that the big, hard, oily, dirty, rainbow-hung Earth on which he lived was a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot lost in the unimaginable infinity of the Universe. "
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