Things didn’t look too promising when Bach Akademie Australia Artistic Director and lead violin Madeleine Easton welcomed the packed audience at St James’s Church, Sydney, with her left arm in a sling.

She had sprained it in a fall just two weeks before the start of the ensemble’s latest tour marking a homecoming for one of Australia’s finest Baroque sopranos, Miriam Allan. SA violinist and Akademie regular Simone Slattery stepped into take over Concertmaster duties for the program which featured JS Bach’s secular cantatas, culminating in his light-hearted Coffee Cantata, the closest he ever got to dabbling in the world of opera.

Allan, who sang at Prince Philip’s funeral in 2021 and has performed with all the top international ensembles including Les Arts Florissants, Collegium Vocale Gent and the Monteverdi Choir, starts the concert with the radiant Wedding Cantata Weichet nur, betrübte Schatten, sharing the limelight with oboist Adam Masters for the opening aria and with Slattery’s deftly weaving violin for ‘When the spring breezes blow’.

Weddings & Parties over Coffee. Photo © Keith Saunders

Blessed with a sweet and pure tone across her entire range, Allan lights up the historic church with her smile as well as her voice, being delightfully coquettish in fourth aria with the lines “to jest and caress is better than Flora’s passing pleasure”.

This bodes well for the highlight of the concert, the Coffee Cantata in which she plays the daughter Liesgen whose caffeine addiction is a bargaining chip as her father Schlendrian (sung by Allan’s real dad, veteran baritone Christopher) tries to marry her off.

But before that we get to hear the soprano’s rich and dramatic chest voice in the Soul’s aria from Selig ist der Mann, in which she tells Jesus that she would wish for death if He did not love her, to which Christopher responds with his generous vibrato and commendable melismas that she needs to get a grip and the sun will shine kindly on her.

To give the program some contrast the Akademie’s eight-strong instrumentalists performed two works, keeping to the family theme, by father and favourite son.

Wilhelm Friedemann’s two-movement Sinfonia in D minor features a soulful duet – in this case beautifully realised by Mikaela Oberg’s flute and Masters’ oboe – over sighing strings before finishing off with a sprightly string fugal Allegro, showing all his father’s mathematical leanings.

It’s a sad footnote that WF, who inherited large chunks of Bach’s manuscripts, sold many of them when he fell on hard times – possibly the reason that today we only have 22 of the 50 secular cantatas that JS composed.

Oberg’s flute featured nimbly in the other orchestral work, the Ouverture from Bach Snr’s Orchestral Suite No. 2 in B minor, as well as taking a star turn in the Coffee Cantata’s delightful aria Ei! wie schmeckt der Coffee süße (“How sweet coffee tastes”) in which the daughter proclaims a shot is “more delicious than a thousand kisses, milder than muscatel wine”.

Father and daughter dressed in costume for this 30-minute Baroque romp, Christopher decked out in a daggy dressing gown with an “I’m your father” T-shirt as they negotiated over cups of coffee at the breakfast table, she reading Hello magazine and he studying the form guide.

Dan Walker contributed his fine tenor and acting skills in the brief role of the Narrator/barista.

Easton may well have been forced to watch on from the pews, but she must have been delighted with the way Slattery led from the subs’ bench.

Bach Akademie Australia presents Weddings and Parties over Coffee at St Finbar’s Church, Glenbrook, NSW on 16 August.