ConcertPulse
Simon Rattle felt no hesitation in commencing his tenure as Chief Conductor of the Chor and Symphonieorchester des BR with Haydn’s Creation. “It contains everything. The whole world. It looks both towards the past and far into the future of everything music can be. It is balance and revolution at the same time, a true work of the Enlightenment.” Magnificent choruses, graceful melodies, the finest polyphony, all firmly anchored in an optimistic view of humanity: “Anyone who doesn’t automatically feel better after hearing it really needs help,“ Simon Rattle says with a wink.” The Creation is healthy in a very honest way.” But health also includes a good dose of humor, and Haydn provides it, even in a setting as sacred as the Creation story. At the same time, a work radiating light also casts some shadows on our own present. What has remained of the spirit of the Enlightenment? And what have we done with the “world, so great, so wonderful”?
Late romantic confessions! Dvořák was keen to breathe fresh life into Catholic church music in his native Bohemia. For him, religiousness was a necessary prerequisite for his creative work, and he said: "Don't be surprised that I am so devout – an artist who is not devout will not achieve such things". As he grew older, the setting of liturgical texts became increasingly important for him – possibly as a way of expressing his thoughts about the end of life. He wrote his "Biblical Songs” in 1894, while living in New York. Shortly beforehand, news had reached him of the deaths of his contemporaries Tchaikovsky and Gounod, as well as the news from home that his father had passed away. These ten songs, which set texts from the Book of Psalms, range in expression from laments and prayers of intercession, fear and confidence to the praise of God and trust in his help – moving pieces written in a state of grief far from his beloved Bohemia. The concert will close with the musical volcanic eruptions and unforgettably catchy melodies of the popular D minor Symphony by César Franck, whom a contemporary once jokingly called a "modulation machine”. Like Dvořák, the Belgian-born composer was a strict Catholic. For many years he worked as an organist in Paris, developing a creativity all of his own as a composer – as attested by this symphony, which was first performed in 1889. The music portrays numerous struggles, but ends in inner triumph. Its final bars are solemn, majestic, proud – after all, it was said of Franck that “he knows himself to be one with God and trusts in the mission He has given him on earth.”
“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.