Dresdner Kapellsolisten / Jan Vogler / Hansjörg Albrecht

Hansjörg Albrecht

Carl-Philipp-Emanuel-Bach-Chor / Dresdner Festspielorchester / Hansjörg Albrecht

Bach, Bach, Bach ... Johann Sebastian Bach was a master of pastiche: he loved to reuse his own compositions in new contexts and to copy his pieces in order to demonstrate their flexibility and universality and to give them new expression. With the Lukas-Passion, we hear a work in precisely this pastiche manner. Bach never managed to finish writing this Passion. Now the Bach specialists Lorenz and Christoph Eglhuber, together with the renowned conductor Hansjörg Albrecht, have gone into Bach’s copying and composing room to write this missing Passion from his own compositions. The result is a highly exciting, dramatic work – from pieces written by Bach himself. The Carl-Philipp-Emanuel-Bach-Chor Hamburg brings it to the stage with the finest cast. The soloists are all absolute Bach experts. The Dresdner Festspielorchester is an orchestra made up of members of top-class ensembles of period performance practice. The audience can expect a festive baroque concert in the Passion season!

NDR Barock / Dorothee Oberlinger / Hansjörg Albrecht

With Dorothee Oberlinger, the International Bach Festival Hamburg has invited a real shooting star for early music. The recorder player and conductor is one of today’s leading international figures in the field of early music and has been honoured with numerous national and international music awards. She is coming to the International Bachfest Hamburg 2025 with very different works in her luggage.

Carl-Philipp-Emanuel-Bach-Chor Hamburg / Symphoniker Hamburg / Hansjörg Albrecht

»Could you give your orchestra a little longing for spring when you play it, because I had that with me when I wrote it. I would like the very first trumpet blast to sound as if from on high, like a call to awakening,« wrote Robert Schumann to the conductor Wilhelm Taubert about his First Symphony in B flat major, of which he once proudly proclaimed: »It was born in a fiery hour.« It was written in a true creative frenzy: the 31-year-old composer sketched it in just four days at the end of January 1841 and finished the entire score a good three weeks later, on 20 February. This early spring symphony by Robert Schumann forms the opening of this intoxicating evening, the second half of which features the famous Carmina Burana. Carl Orff became famous overnight in 1937 with the large-scale Carmina Burana. Contemporary harmonies and expressive melodies are combined here with elements of medieval music, powerful rhythms and an artful simplicity. Orff composed this work to Latin, Middle and Old High German songs that were found in 1803 in the Benediktbeuren monastery in Bavaria and are today among the most important literary testimonies of the Middle Ages. In three parts, the songs of Carmina Burana tell of love and courtship, of romance and mysticism, but above all of the cycle of life. To this day, the work is one of the most popular pieces of serious music of the 20th century.