目录

专辑简介

Bach\’s St Matthew Passion is undoubtedly a highlight of vocal music. With a lean choir and double soloists, this recording is orientated towards the composer\’s historical specifications. Together with the Ensemble Frauenkirche Dresden, which plays historically informed music on modern instruments, the vocalists succeed in creating a homogeneous, self-contained and coherent interpretation of Bach\’s longest and most extensive work.

In the ‘St Matthew Passion’, Bach sets the suffering and death of Jesus Christ to music. When we listen to this moving work, we also unconsciously reflect on questions of human guilt, on the sins of the modern world, on punishment and reconciliation, love and hate, violence and opportunism, ‘penance and repentance’, but above all: our own small conscience in the face of the world\’s events. The opening chorus already reads: ‘Behold the bridegroom … look upon our guilt.’ In remembrance of the destruction of Dresden, such questions still arise today, and it would certainly be in the composer\’s spirit if his St Matthew Passion, which leaves no listener untouched, provided the cues for long, quiet reflection. This work shows us that there is new hope at every end, no matter how terrible. A renewed faith. ‘World, go out, let Jesus in!’ That is how haunting it is – even for completely unbelieving souls such as Karl Liebknecht, who wrote about the work: ‘If you look through the magic fabric, you are completely intoxicated with bliss. Music knows nothing sweeter, more tender, more touching (…).’

This recording is a multi-day production based around the annual commemorative concert on 13 February in Dresden\’s Frauenkirche – a musical summit shortly before the start of the pandemic in spring 2020. In Matthias Grünert\’s words: ‘Energy, emotion, memory – may this recording carry the atmosphere of this moving concert event into the world!