“Giving Bach the honor” –
that is the guiding principle of Christoph Spering, the well-known conductor and church musician, when he treats the ears of his audience to his Chorus Musicus Köln and Das Neue Orchester. Christoph Spering and his ensembles have been making the early music scene sit up and take notice for more than 30 years. In 2017 they were awarded an ECHO Klassik prize for their recording of the Luther Cantatas by Johann Sebastian Bach.
The basis of the cantatas selected for this concert from Bach’s so-called choral cantata year 1724/25 is in each case a Protestant hymn. It is usually elaborated in a triumphant opening chorus and then reappears in a simple form in the final chorale. In the middle stanzas, Bach used arias and recitatives to create links between the traditional cantata form and a more modern variant based on Italian opera.
Christoph Spering concentrates with his choir and orchestra on Bach cantatas, whose selection allows a representative view of Bach’s vast cantata cosmos. Spering’s interpretations are not only coherent, but above all lively – which comes into its own in the beautiful atmosphere of the parish church of St. Agatha in Mettingen with its very good acoustics.
Christoph Spering sees himself as a “modern musician” who seeks new possibilities of interpretation on the basis of historically informed performance practice and with historical instruments – for performances and recordings alike. This concerns, for example, questions of scoring and tuning, the role of the organ, or the importance of pulse and tempo. Arias are enriched with dance elements, recitatives are deprived of all their docile dryness. The tonal quality, spatiality and transparency of voices and instruments also allow the works in his productions to be experienced in a new way.
Spering emphasizes that his search for new approaches is not an end in itself, but rather “to get closer to the mystery of Bach”. He became internationally known with the first recording of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion in Mendelssohn’s 1841 version. Already in 2005, Christoph Spering was awarded the honorary title of Church Music Director of the Evangelical Church in the Rhineland.
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