Salzburg Easter Festival
PROGRAMME
F. MENDELSSOHN BARTHOLDY Elijah
- Emily Pogorelc soprano
- Wiebke Lehmkuhl alto
- Pene Pati tenor
- Andrè Schuen bass
- Chor des Bayerischen Rundfunks
- Maxim Emelyanychev conductor
ABOUT THIS CONCERT
Although Salzburg has been one of our regular and much-cherished concert cities for many years, the MCO’s last participation in the Easter Festival dates back to 1998. We are very happy to be back!
“Wounds and wonders” is the motto of this year’s Easter Festival. “He was
wounded for our transgressions...and with his stripes we are healed”, says the
prophet Isaiah in the Old Testament. , and the main character Elijah, in Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s probably most popular oratorio, does not stop warning his
people about those transgressions right from his almost shocking first appearance at the beginning of this oratorio.
Composed
upon commission for the Birmingham Triennial Music Festival in 1846, Elijah,
with its numerous compelling mass scenes, stands in the tradition of Händel’s grand
oratorios like the Messiah, which had never gone out of fashion in England after the composer's death in 1759. On the
other hand, Mendelssohn, who
in 1835 had become Kapellmeister at the Gewandhaus, wrote the shorter
four-part chorales of his own oratorio in a style that was formally, if not
harmonically, very much indebted to Johann Sebastian Bach, one of his
predecessors in Leipzig.
This is one of the rare occasions to hear the MCO in a work
for choir, after performances with Theodor Currentzis in 2019 and with Philipp
Herrweghe in 2022. It is the Orchestra’s second collaboration with conductor
Maxim Emelyanychev.
photo (c) Andrej Grilc
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