The concert of soloists and the NFM Choir conducted by Lionel Sow will feature the works of great German composers of the Baroque era - Heinrich Schütz and Johann Sebastian Bach. The repertoire will be complemented by Knut Nystedt’s Immortal Bach, based on the song Komm, süßer Tod (Come, sweet death) by the Leipzig cantor.

The concert will open with the Musikalische Exequien op. 7 by Heinrich Schütz, considered the most important German composer working before Johann Sebastian Bach. It is funereal music, written at the turn of 1635 and 1636 for the funeral ceremonies of Count Henry II of the Reuss family. According to the practice of the time, the aristocrat left behind a number of clues regarding the course of the ceremony, including the nature of the music that should be played during it. Yet we cannot be sure whether it was Schütz’s wish to create the Musikalische Exequien – according to historical records, the commission came from the count’s widow and sons.

“Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord,” these are words from the Bible, and more specifically from the Apocalypse, which is the only prophetic book in the New Testament that presents a vision of the end of the present world. In Luther’s Bible, the beginning of this sentence reads: “Selig sind die Toten” – and this is the textual background of another of Schütz’s compositions, which will be heard during the concert.

The Jesu meine Freude is the longest and the most complex motet by Johann Sebastian Bach. In it, the composer refers to the Lutheran hymn of the same name. Its text is intertwined in individual stanzas with the words contained in Chapter 8 of the Letter to the Romans. The evening will be crowned with the sounds of Knut Nystedt’s Immortal Bach from 1988, which is a tribute to the timeless work of the master of Baroque polyphony, considered by many to be the greatest composer of all time.