It is an event: a complete recording of the 18 cantatas by Johann Ludwig Bach, cousin of the famous Johann Sebastian—cantatas that the latter himself copied out and performed in Leipzig in 1726, exactly 300 years ago. For the occasion, keyboardist and conductor Johanna Soller presents the first complete recording. 
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In 1726, during his third year in Leipzig, Johann Sebastian Bach did something unusual: he stopped composing his own cantatas; instead, between February and September, he conducted a total of 18 cantatas by his distant cousin Johann Ludwig Bach—cantatas that he himself had transcribed—at St Thomas’s Church in Leipzig. Why? We do not know. But one may assume that he was simply so convinced of their musical quality that he wanted to introduce them to the Leipzig public. Yet these works, preserved for us in Johann Sebastian Bach’s own manuscript, long remained forgotten. Indeed, only a few were available in modern editions before the German church musician, conductor, organist and harpsichordist Johanna Soller turned her attention to them and rediscovered them. With her ensemble Capella Sollertia, she now presents a recording of these 18 cantatas on four discs.
Johanna Soller, your ensemble Capella Sollertia, which you founded in 2019, is a vocal and instrumental group with flexible forces depending on the project. What was the original idea behind it?
J. S.: During my studies, I had already founded a vocal ensemble, the München-Vocalconsort, with which I carried out several projects: Bach motets, the Mass in B minor and, in 2019, the St Matthew Passion. On that occasion, an orchestra of such quality came together that I told myself I wanted to make it last, give it a name and turn it into an ensemble in which singers and instrumentalists would form a single unit—which seems essential to me in music. That is how Capella Sollertia was born. We first launched a series based on Bach’s cantatas, Cantate um 1715, in which we continue to explore this period of his work by always comparing one of his cantatas with that of one of his contemporaries, on the same theme and for the same Sunday.
To create these correspondences, I was constantly searching for repertoire from his circle. To this end, we also performed cantatas by Graupner and Telemann for the first time, but I soon came across Johann Ludwig Bach. Everything about him was so fascinating and so worthy of discovery that I wanted to delve into it with the ensemble. Today, this has become the heart of Capella Sollertia: alongside the great repertoire, we play Baroque music from central Germany, which is still largely unexplored.
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