Sir John Eliot Gardiner / The Constellation Choir & Orchestra

• Classical Music

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)!

PERFORMERS

The Constellation Orchestra orchestra

The Constellation Choir choir

Marie Luise Werneburg soprano

Eline Welle mezzo-soprano

Peter Davoren tenor

Alex Ashworth bass

Sir John Eliot Gardiner conductor

PROGRAM

Johann Sebastian Bach
Schwingt freudig euch empor, BWV 36c

Marc-Antoine Charpentier
Kyrie, Gloria und Credo

- Interval -

Marc-Antoine Charpentier
Sanctus e Benedictus und Agnus Dei

Johann Sebastian Bach
Unser Mund sei voll Lachens, BWV 110