Sir John Eliot Gardiner

Sir John Eliot Gardiner

“From the heart, may it again go to the heart.” Thus Beethoven wrote at the head of the Kyrie in his Missa solemnis. Shortly before completing the work he called it the greatest he had ever written. This monumental yet enigmatic masterpiece of sacred music is less a strictly liturgical composition than a vehicle for kindling authentic religious feelings in the listeners. His Mass thus bespeaks a thoroughly Enlightenment view of religion; it also reveals a sense of drama, as when the final plea for peace, “Dona nobis pacem”, is preceded by vivid scenes of war. In John Eliot Gardiner a conductor steps up to the BRSO rostrum who has often plunged into the gigantic cosmos of the Missa solemnis in concerts and recordings, probing the field of tension between faith and emotionalism that goes directly to the heart.

Sir John Eliot Gardiner

“From the heart, may it again go to the heart.” Thus Beethoven wrote at the head of the Kyrie in his Missa solemnis. Shortly before completing the work he called it the greatest he had ever written. This monumental yet enigmatic masterpiece of sacred music is less a strictly liturgical composition than a vehicle for kindling authentic religious feelings in the listeners. His Mass thus bespeaks a thoroughly Enlightenment view of religion; it also reveals a sense of drama, as when the final plea for peace, “Dona nobis pacem”, is preceded by vivid scenes of war. In John Eliot Gardiner a conductor steps up to the BRSO rostrum who has often plunged into the gigantic cosmos of the Missa solemnis in concerts and recordings, probing the field of tension between faith and emotionalism that goes directly to the heart.

Sir John Eliot Gardiner

Sir John Eliot Gardiner

Sir John Eliot Gardiner / The Constellation Choir & Orchestra

With his newly founded ensembles The Constellation Choir & Orchestra, Sir John Eliot Gardiner brings beautiful baroque music by Johann Sebastian Bach and Marc-Antoine Charpentier to the Elbphilharmonie on the second weekend of Advent. It is the ensembles’ inaugural performance and with Gardiner on the rostrum, the ensembles can draw on the period performance pioneer’s decades of expertise. In his midnight mass »Messe de minuit«, composed around 1694, Marc-Antoine Charpentier elicits delightful rhythms and timbres from ten old French Christmas carols and so continues on the country’s tradition of celebrating the good news with dance-like vigour and great cheerfulness. With the two cantatas by Johann Sebastian Bach that follow, composed for the Christmas seasons in 1725 and 1731 in Leipzig’s Thomaskirche, Gardiner and his ensembles present the composer whom the conductor once described as the most important of all for him. The Constellation Orchestra & Choir are the flagship groups of the Springhead Constellation founded by Sir John Eliot Gardiner. The conductor aims to realise ambitious, multidisciplinary concert projects and go on tour with them worldwide. What could be a better motto for this concert than the title of the Bach cantata »Schwingt freudig euch empor« (Rise up joyfully)!