ConcertPulse
Guest performance
Philharmonie Berlin, Chamber Music Hall (Berlin)
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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)!
