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Czech Philharmonic • Nicholas Kraemer
Rudolfinum — Dvořák Hall
Price from 350 to 1550 CZK
Together with conductor Nicholas Kraemer, the orchestra will follow Bach's Mass in B minor, which is considered by many to be one of the finest Baroque compositions and in which one can hear echoes of Gregorian chant.
Programme
Johann Sebastian Bach
Mass in B minor, BWV 232 (130' with intermission)
Performers
Miriam Kutrowatz soprano
Catriona Morison mezzo-soprano + alto
Patrick Grahl tenor
Christian Immler bass
Collegium Vocale 1704
Václav Luks choirmaster
Nicholas Kraemer conductor
Czech Philharmonic
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For this Czech Philharmonic excursion into pre-Classical repertoire, conductor Nicholas Kraemer, replacing Chief Conductor Semyon Bychkov, tackles one of the supreme works of the Baroque era: Johann Sebastian Bach’s monumental Mass in B minor.
To this day, there is no proof of why the Protestant composer wrote a mass in 1733 using the Catholic rite and one which would be difficult to employ in liturgical practice. According to popular legend, it was Dresden’s Catholic court which commissioned Bach to write a mass, but new discoveries in correspondence from the time now point towards Vienna and the patronage of the Bohemian Count Johann Adam von Questenberg. It is now believed that von Questenberg, Bach’s contemporary and a great admirer of his, probably commissioned the work for a Solemn Mass held for the Feast of Saint Cecilia by a musical fraternity in Vienna known as the “Musicalische Congregation”.
Today the work is deservedly celebrated as a perfect synthesis of all the baroque master’s compositional techniques and procedures.
Performers
Miriam Kutrowatz soprano
Despite her youth, the soprano Miriam Kutrowatz is beginning to make headway on leading operatic and concert stages. She is a member of the opera studio at the Vienna State Opera, and in the 2023/24 season she made her debut at the Zurich Opera House. She has appeared with such ensembles as the Orchestra of the Elbephilharmonie and the Cologne Philharmonic Orchestra, and she was a soloist in Bach’s Mass in B Minor with the Orchestra of the Vienna Academy. Her repertoire is not limited to a particular era: she sings Monteverdi, Handel, Mozart, Mahler, and Strauss.
The artistic qualities of this student in the master’s degree programme at the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Vienna under Florian Boesch are also documented by a number of prizes from the P. A. Cesti Competition (baroque opera repertoire) and participation in the semifinals at the Glyndebourne Opera Cup in 2020. A year later she also made her debut at the Salzburg Festival. Besides taking part in masterclasses in her field (under Marijana Mijanović, Malcolm Martineau et al.), she has also taken lessons in contemporary dance.
Catriona Morison mezzo-soprano
After having graduated from music school in Glasgow (Royal Conservatoire of Scotland), Berlin, and Weimar, the career of the Scottish mezzo-soprano Catriona Morison has been on the ascent step by step. She was a member of the opera studio in Weimar, then she won an engagement at the opera in Wuppertal, but the breakthrough of her career came in 2017 (at age 31), when she was the winner at the famed competition BBC Cardiff Singer of the World. Since then, we have been seeing her routinely on concert stages with famed orchestras such as the Cologne Philharmonic, the Orchestra of the Leipzig Gewandhaus, and the Elbephilharmonie and at the festivals in Edinburgh and Salzburg. She has also appeared at the BBC Proms. She has not forgotten about Wuppertal, however, where she recently sang the role of Nerone (The Coronation of Poppaea).
Her repertoire knows no limits, encompassing works from four centuries including contemporary music. For example, she gave the world premieres of This Frame is Part of the Painting by Errollyn Wallen and of the Prague Symphony by Detlev Glanert, with which she made her Czech Philharmonic debut two years ago. Last season, she stood in at the last moment for the ailing Christa Mayer in Mahler’s Third Symphony.
Patrick Grahl tenor
Patrick Grahl was born in Leipzig and was initially a member of the St. Thomas Choir of Leipzig under Georg Christoph Biller; he then went on to complete his singing training at the Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy Academy of Music in Leipzig with Professor Berthold Schmid, graduating with distinction in the master-class examination. Patrick Grahl attended master-classes held by Peter Schreier, Gotthold Schwarz, Gerd Türk, Ileana Cotrubaş and Prof. Karl-Peter Kammerlander which gave him decisive momentum for his artistic development. While still a student Patrick Grahl was able to work on and perform roles such as Alfred (in Die Fledermaus by Johann Strauß), Tamino (in Mozart’s Die Zauber Flöte) and Albert (in Albert Herring by Britten). He was also to be heard as the Young Servant in Elektra by Richard Strauss, and as Shepherd / Voice of a Young Sailor in Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde at the Opéra National de Lyon. During the current season Patrick Grahl gives guest appearances as Don Ottavio in Mozart’s Don Giovanni at the Teatro La Fenice di Venezia.
In 2016 the tenor won 1st prize at the XX International Johann Sebastian Bach Competition in Leipzig. He is already much in demand as an oratorio and concert singer and has been invited to perform as soloist with orchestras such as the Leipzig Gewandhausorchester, the Dresden Philharmonic, the NDR Radio Philharmonic, the Gürzenichorchester Cologne as well as the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia and the London Symphony Orchestra; he has worked with conductors such as Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Daniele Gatti, Hartmut Haenchen, Ludwig Güttler, Peter Schreier, Andrew Manze and Leopold Hager. Patrick Grahl still has close ties with the St. Thomas Choir of Leipzig and with the Dresdner Kreuzchor.
Patrick Grahl’s concerts in the 2018/2019 season include Mendelssohn’s Lobgesang in the Maulbronn monastery, Bach’s Mass in B minor with the Münchener Bachchor in Moscow, Bach’s Christmas Oratorio in Leipzig with the Gewandhaus Orchestra and the St. Thomas Choir, Mozart’s Requiem with Bachakademie Stuttgart conducted by Hans-Christoph Rademann, Mozart’s Mass in C minor in Turin under the direction of Omer Meier Wellber, Bach’s St. Matthew Passion in Dresden with Dresdner Kreuzchor, Leopold Mozart’s Missa solemnis at the Mozart Festival in Augsburg with the conductor Alessandro de Marchi and Haydn’s Creation in Bonn under the baton of Paul Krämer. The highlights of the season are Mendelssohn’s Elijah with the Basel Chamber Orchestra conducted by Christopher Moulds, a tour with the Collegium Vocale Gent, and Mozart’s Requiem with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Manfred Honeck
Besides his many commitments on the concert and opera stage Patrick Grahl also has a dedicated interest in chamber music projects and recitals, for instance with his male voice quartet Thios Omilos or the ensemble Barockwerk Ost, with which in 2014 he won 1st prize of the Advancement prize for Early Music awarded by Saarland Radio and the Academy of Ancient Music in the Saarland. Until 2013 Patrick Grahl was also awarded a scholarship by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Bonn.
Christian Immler bass baritone
Having grown from a choirboy in the Tölzer Knabenchor into a star bass-baritone who travels to the top concert halls around the world, Christian Immler is known to us mainly as an interpreter of baroque and early classical works, but his repertoire is gradually expanding to include the recital and orchestra tradition of the 19th century and onwards to the works of contemporary composers. He is not neglecting opera productions either.
Besides his vocal studies at London’s Guildhall School of Music (Rudolf Piernay), he also studied musicology. His international career began with victory at the Nadia and Lili Boulanger Competition in Paris, which opened him the door to the world’s top orchestras (BBC Symphony Orchestra, Orchestra of the Leipzig Gewandhaus, Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam) and famed concert halls. He mainly visits those halls with his piano partner of many years, Helmut Deutsch (their joint CD won the prestigious Diapason découverte).
In 2022 he thrilled the Prague public as Pilate in the St John Passion, and soon afterwards he made his successful debut with the Czech Philharmonic in the Prague Symphony by Detlev Glanert.
Collegium Vocale 1704
The vocal ensemble Collegium Vocale 1704 is among the worldwide elite in its field, and it appears together with the baroque orchestra Collegium 1704 on the world’s most important stages including Vienna’s Konzerthaus, the Philharmonie in Berlin, and Paris’s Maison de la Radio. It also participates regularly at the famed festivals in Salzburg and Warsaw. With its founder and conductor Václav Luks, the two ensembles present a concert season at the Rudolfinum in Prague, and Collegium Vocale 1704 also presents chamber music concerts separately at the culture palace Vzlet, where they have had their facilities since 2021.
Both ensembles collaborate regularly with the Bachfest Leipzig and the Opéra Royal in Versailles, which was a coproducer (along with the National Theatre in Brno and the Théâtre de Caen) of Handel’s opera Alcina performed in early 2022. Among their most important recent CDs have been the first Czech recording of Handel’s Messiah, Rameau’s Boreádes, which received the Trophées 2020 award and the 2021 Edison Award as the best opera recording of the year, and Zelenka’s Missa 1724 (2020).
Václav Luks conductor
Václav Luks studied at the Pilsen Conservatoire and the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, and he further engaged in the specialised study of early music at the Schole Cantorum Basiliensis in Basel, Switzerland. After returning from abroad in 2005, he transformed the chamber ensemble Collegium 1704, which he had founded during his studies, into a baroque orchestra, and he established the vocal ensemble Collegium Vocale 1704. In addition to his intensive work with Collegium 1704, Václav Luks also collaborates with other renowned ensembles such as the Netherlands Bach Society, the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, and the Handel & Haydn Society in Boston. He has worked with internationally renowned singers such as Karina Gauvin, Vivica Genaux, Philippe Jaroussky, Bejun Mehta, Sarah Mingardo, and Andreas Schöll. Under his direction, Collegium 1704 recorded the music for Peter Václavʼs epic film Il Boemo about the life of Josef Mysliveček. Václav Luks also served as the film director’s chief musical advisor. In June 2022, he received the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French ambassador in Prague.
Nicholas Kraemer conductor
Nicholas Kraemer, a pioneer of historically informed interpretation and now the chief guest conductor of the Chicago-based orchestra Music of the Baroque, has earned an international reputation for leading ensembles specialising in early music. He guest conducts modern orchestras as well (especially in the USA and the UK, but also with the Berlin Philharmonic, for example), putting his knowledge of informed interpretation to use. Although music of the Baroque is his main specialisation, his repertoire spans from Monteverdi to the present.
He began his career as a harpsichordist, but he soon changed over to playing basso continuous in front of an orchestra. He conducts from the harpsichord to this day, as the Prague public witnessed in January 2024 at his Czech Philharmonic debut. He bases his carefully considered interpretations on historical knowledge of great depth, as he demonstrated in one of the mainstays of his broad repertoire, Handel’s oratorio Messiah. The performance’s authenticity and its lively character were appreciated by the audience, and a critic called Kraemer’s concert one of the season’s highpoints.
Compositions
Johann Sebastian Bach
Mass in B minor, BWV 232
A cathedral of baroque music, a monument to the divinity, the zenith of the art of composing for all time… These are some of the words written over the centuries to describe the vast Mass in B minor by Johann Sebastian Bach at the end of his tenure as cantor at Leipzig’s St Thomas Church. Though the work is now played in concert halls and churches around the world, Bach never heard it in its entirety. In fact, it was not heard for several more generations. Bach put the Mass together during the last two years before his death as a kind of shrine to this life’s work.
By 1748, Bach was already 63 years old and had nearly ceased carrying out duties at St Thomas’s Church because of health problems. All the more time was then left for his great cycles of compositions such as The Art of the Fugue, The Musical Sacrifice, and the Mass in B minor. It seems that in his waning years he wanted to compile and preserve not only the best of his work, but also the musical style of the Late Baroque. He sensed the arrival of a new era that would cast aside strict baroque polyphony and that period’s fascinating systems and respect for tradition; the time had arrived for the generation of his sons. It may have been for the sake of a universal legacy that Bach, a Protestant, made what was for him the unusual choice of the Latin language, which puts the work alongside the Catholic Masses of the period in what is called the Neapolitan style.
Before immersing ourselves into the work’s fascinating genesis, let us take a moment to consider the chosen key of B minor, which definitely was not the most usual in Bach’s day. According to the baroque typology of keys, which was a matter of true importance for composers and listeners, B minor evoked something otherworldly, intangible, awe inspiring. Bach’s contemporary, the music theorist and composer Johann Mattheson, described B minor as “bizarre and melancholy”. Apart from this Mass, Bach wrote only a few other compositions in B minor (two cantatas, a few sonatas and partitas, and of course the two preludes and fugues from his Well-Tempered Clavier). This implies that the choice of key indicated something special.
How did the whole composition come into being with its nine big arias and 18 choral numbers? Certainly not in the order in which it is heard today. The opening Kyrie and Gloria are of key importance for the creation of the whole work. Such a “Missa brevis”, i.e., a short Mass with just two sections, was a usual part of the Protestant liturgy, although it was often used by the Catholics as well. The Missa brevis was also cultivated at the Sophienkirche in Dresden, which belonged to the elector’s court. In 1733, Bach’s eldest son Wilhelm Friedemann became the organist there. Bach came to Dresden for his coronation ceremony and presented to the new Elector of Saxony, Frederick Augustus II, the score of the Kyrie and Gloria, constituting a complete Missa brevis. The composer may have regarded his gift as a complete composition, but it seems that he had brought it as a “sample” for the creation of a large-scale Mass of a kind that was also performed in Dresden. We do not know whether Bach had hopes of being commissioned to write such a work, but no such commission was forthcoming from the elector. Therefore, it was later in the year 1748 mentioned above that Bach used the Kyrie and the Gloria, jointly designated as a “Missa”, as the beginning of his great Mass in B minor. That he had Dresden in mind even 15 years later is revealed by other attributes of the composition that are typical of music then being performed in Catholic Dresden: the virtuosic horn part and the colourful diversity of numbers employing an alternation and overlapping of solo and choral parts (in the manner of the “Neapolitan Mass”). At the elector’s residence, work was underway from 1739 on building what would become the court’s Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, although it was not finished until five years after Bach’s death. Still, he may have had a majestic work in mind that would be suitable for that church’s consecration ceremony.
Yet another hypothesis appeared recently about the direction where Bach’s Mass may have been heading. The latest musicological research of Bach’s correspondence has made it clear that at the end of the 1740s, a large-scale Mass was commissioned from the composer by Count Johann Adam von Questenberg from Jaroměřice nad Rokytnou, who spent many years working in the service of the emperor. It was supposed to have been played at St Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna at a Mass held annually by a sacred music fraternity in Vienna for the Feast of Saint Cecilia. However, there are no sources stating that Bach’s Mass in B minor was played on that or any other occasion.
While Johann Sebastian Bach had the opening Kyrie and Gloria available to begin work on a complete Mass, to complete the setting of the Ordinary in accordance with the firmly established rules, he needed to add the Credo (Symbolum Nicenum – Nicene Creed), the Sanctus, and the Agnus Dei. Entirely in the spirit of period practice and in the already mentioned effort to preserve his worthiest compositions, he chose to make use of musical material from his cantatas or from instrumental concertos that are now lost, to which he added some choral parts. The oldest music in the Mass in B minor is the Sanctus, which Bach composed and performed in Leipzig on Christmas Eve in 1724. In the section Gratias agimus tibi, part of the Gloria, the composer was working with a theme from the cantata Wir danken dir, BWV 29, the Qui tollis comes from the cantata Wer sich selbst erhöhet, BWV 47, in the Credo we find snippets from the cantatas BWV 12, 120, and 170, and the Agnus Dei contains thematic material from an aria in the Easter Oratorio. For the Osanna, Bach used material from the secular congratulatory cantata Preise dein Glücke, gesegnetes Sachsen, BWV 215. (Is it a coincidence that he returned to material from a composition he had written in 1734 in honour of the Elector of Saxony being made King of Poland and Lithuania?) Entirely new sections were then added to the Mass in B minor, such as the Confiteor, part of the Credo, in a unique setting for five voices.
The impression that the Mass makes as an integral whole is evidence of Bach’s skill and genius. It feels as if it had been written all at once. At the same time, however, it is quite stylistically diverse—we find in it the homophonic textures of the Renaissance, complicated imitation, the Italian concertante style, and even hints of dances. Bach’s intention seems to have been to combine the inviolable, sacrosanct elements of church music including its symbolism (including 3/4 time in the Gloria or the symmetrical structure of the Credo with the Crucifixus at its centre as a symbol of the Holy Trinity) with the best that the secular realm had to offer. This also applies to the inventive instrumentation, where usual elements (the use of trumpets and timpani in the Gloria) are supplemented, for example, by a pair of flutes in the Domine Deus, the original discourse of French horn and bassoons in the aria Quoniam tu solus sanctus, or a third oboe in the Sanctus. Bach also handles the vocal parts in an original way, with contrasting interspersions of solos and choir, most markedly in the Credo. The plentiful use of choir is also a link to Dresden, where this was an expectation, whether because of Catholic liturgical practice or because of the financial resources of the elector’s court. From performance practice at Leipzig’s St Thomas Church, Bach was accustomed to the use of choir only in compositions intended for major holidays and special occasions. The complete Mass certainly belonged in that category, thus we find eight vocal parts in the Osanna and other divisions of parts (six-voice choir in the Sanctus), while in the Kyrie II, Gratias, and Dona nobis pacem the composition calls for additional singers (“ripienists”) to support the soloists.
After Bach’s death, there were performances of various parts of the “Great Catholic Mass”, as it was referred to even by the composer’s sons Wilhelm Friedemann and Carl Philipp Emanuel, but we have a mention from Berlin of a first complete performance in 1834. Some other sources say it was not performed until 1859 at Leipzig’s St Thomas Church. In 1845, the publisher Simrock issued the composition in print with the title “Hohe Messe in h moll” (Hohe Messe means “High Mass”). Because of its length, the Mass in B minor is not suitable for the liturgy and belongs in the concert hall. Despite having been neglected at first, for nearly 200 years now it has been serving the purpose for which Bach created it: as a compendium of his inspiring mastery and of the style that he brought to its culmination in his music.