Belgium is not only the country of the tastiest beer in the world, it also produces fantastic classical music. For example by the Ghent-based B’Rock Orchestra, which has put itself on the international map with dazzling interpretations of music from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. During this program they are joined by the excellent Canadian bass-baritone Jonathon Adams and the internationally acclaimed soprano Deborah Cachet.

The concert opens with Ich geh und suche mit Verlangen, a dialogue cantata, of which Johann Sebastian Bach wrote several. The underlying idea is always the same: the searching soul (soprano) and Christ (bass) are in conversation and (eventually) declare love to each other. Sometimes there is strict alternation between the two voices, but in the final piece Liebster Jesu, mein Verlangen the dialogue culminates in a duet. The theme of the searching soul is also found in the song An die Einsamkeit by Bach’s contemporary Johann Philipp Krieger.

In the Double Concerto for Oboe and Violin, the two instruments embrace each other, but are also given the opportunity by Bach to shine each on its own.

The Sinfonia with which the cantata Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis opens poignantly sets the tone for the concerns Bach shares in the rest of the work. Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber was the finest violinist around in the seventeenth century. His fifteen-movement Mystery or Rosary sonatas are therefore an absolute baroque masterpiece, with the icing on the cake being the Passacaglia for solo violin, played by concertmaster and violinist Cecilia Bernardini.