Program
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750)
The St Matthew Passion
a sacred oratorio for solo voices, double choir and double orchestra with libretto by Picander (Christian Friedrich Henrici), BWV 244 (1727–1729/1736)
MusicAeterna Choir and Orchestra
Guest soloists
Conductor Teodor Currentzis
Details
It is difficult to imagine now that Johann Sebastian Bach’s St Matthew Passion – this cornerstone of all European music of the 18th–21st centuries – had to be rediscovered by twenty-year-old Felix Mendelssohn in 1829. In his native Leipzig’s St. Thomas Church, the oratorio was performed not only during Bach’s lifetime, but also for another half century after (until 1800). However, this masterpiece gained European and later world fame thanks to romanticists – at the time when the principles of music organization and the instruments of the Baroque era themselves fell, as it seemed then, into oblivion. The St Matthew Passion (followed by the Mass in B Minor and other works by Bach) proved to have overcome the stylistic, technological, and ideological gap and speak to the people of the new age in their language. Since then, each epoch has comprehended and interpreted this spiritual oratorio in its own way.