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Die sieben letzten Worte unseres Erlösers am Kreuz & Sheba
Joseph Haydn - José Maria Sánchez-Verdú

Die sieben letzten Worte unseres Erlösers am Kreuz & Sheba

Capella Augustina & Andreas Spering

Label: CAvi
Format: CD
Barcode: 4260085535187
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Catalog number: AVI 8553518
Releasedate: 18-11-22
•This recording is the result of a project launched a few years ago by the Brühl Castle Concerts series (Brühler Schlosskonzerte) and Capella Augustina within the framework of the Haydn Festival, which they organize. We commission works that are related in a certain manner with the oeuvre of Joseph Haydn and are explicitly conceived for an orchestra playing on period instruments.

• In 2018, we commissioned a piece from Spanish composer José Maria Sánchez-Verdú

• Ever since it was founded by Andreas Spering in 1996, the Capella Augustina has been one of the most renowned German orchestras in the area of historical performance practice. Moreover, it is the only ensemble of its kind to perform early music as well as contemporary music (commissioned works). In recent years, in its function as Orchestra in Residence of the Brühl Palace Concerts (Brühler Schlosskonzerte), the Capella Augustina has rehearsed and performed nine of Joseph Haydn’s operas, all his oratorios, and almost 70 of his symphonies.
HAYDN and……….

“This recording is the result of a project launched a few years ago by the Brühl Castle Concerts series (Brühler Schlosskonzerte) and Capella Augustina within the framework of the Haydn Festival, which they organize. We commission works that are related in a certain manner with the oeuvre of Joseph Haydn and are explicitly conceived for an orchestra playing on period instruments.

In 2018, we commissioned a piece from Spanish composer José Maria Sánchez-Verdú, one of whose works I had the privilege of premiering a while back: a mesmerizing, fantastically well-orchestrated work. Born in Andalusia, Sánchez-Verdú chose to enact a new musical encounter with Haydn’s work Die sieben letzten Worte unseres Erlösers am Kreuze (“The Seven Last Words of Our Savior on the Cross”). Indeed, as is well known, Haydn wrote Die sieben letzten Worte for a passion liturgy held on Good Friday in the Spanish port town of Cádiz.

Sánchez-Verdú has written Sheba (the Hebrew word for “seven”) as a series of interludes to be inserted between the movements of Haydn’s original work. Each of Haydn’s seven “sonatas” is followed by a 2-to-3-minute movement that serves as a commentary, an exegesis, a prolongation, or an antithesis to what has been previously heard. Sánchez-Verdú’s seventh and final movement leads without pause into the “earthquake” music that closes Die sieben letzten Worte.

Sánchez-Verdú occasionally takes an isolated chord or timbre from Die sieben letzten Worte as a point of departure; in other cases, he has found inspiration in one of Haydn’s musical impulses or gestures. In the process of composing Sheba, the period instruments served as a challenge and as a stimulus. .“ (Excerpt from the booklet notes by Andreas Spering)