To the sky: Vox Luminis & Freiburger Barockorchester / Katowice Culture Nature Festival - NOSPR

In the 18th century, Leipzig became a city of „heavenly music”. It was there that two outstanding composers, Georg Philipp Telemann and Johann Sebastian Bach, worked. Lutheran sacred music in Leipzig was developing with an extraordinary energy, as exemplified in the services in St Thomas’s and St Nicholas’s churches, for which Bach would weekly compose a new cantata. Alongside the cantatas, Leipzig also had an older tradition of performing the so-called Lutheran masses, consisting of music for the Latin parts of Kyrie and Gloria. Bach left as many as four compositions of this type, entirely based on reworkings of his religious cantatas. The most widely known of these is the Mass in F major BWV 233. 

Initially, the position of the Leipzig cantor, held by Bach from 1723 to 1750, was intended for Georg Philipp Telemann. The latter, however, being the most famous composer of the time, preferred to enjoy a higher salary in Hamburg, rather than return to Leipzig, where he had studied and worked as an organist and opera director 20 years before. It was in Hamburg that he composed one of his most popular cantatas, the 1756–1760 two-movement Die Donnerode TWV 6:3, based on Psalms. The eponymous „lightning”, together with the sound of thunder, roaring water and cedar trees breaking, appear in musical form, both in the vocal parts and in the virtuosic orchestral parts. The cantata is a spectacular example of a religious piece in which biblical text is enhanced with sonic illustration, forerunning Joseph Haydn’s oratorio The Creation. 

Wojciech Stępień 

Concert duration (intermission included): approximately 90 minutes

Tickets:

We encourage to purchase festival carnet with a discount (20% for at least three concerts and 25% for at least five concerts).