Jubilate Chamber Choir – The Baroque Inheritance
Gabrieli Jubilate Deo
Schütz Musikalisches Exequien
Schütz Jauchzet dem Herren
Buxtehude Cantate Domino
J.S. Bach Jesu, meine Freude
In 1705, the then-twenty year old J.S. Bach is said to have walked more than 250 miles to watch Dieterich Buxtehude at work in the north German town of Lübeck. This journey, however, might be said to have been started over 150 years earlier, in the elevated choir balconies of St Mark’s, Venice.
Written around 1635, Heinrich Schütz’s Musikalisches Exequien is perhaps his masterpiece. The first requiem setting in German, it has cast a shadow across the centuries, even as far as Johannes Brahms, whose own Ein deutsches Requiem contains rich echoes of Schütz’s opus. Jubilate looks back and forward from this masterwork, tracing its Italianate origins in Giovanni Gabrieli’s works for St Mark’s to its culmination in the towering works of genius by J.S. Bach, over a century later.
Between them, we glimpse the monumental figure of Dietrich Buxtehude, whose musicianship Bach revered above all other contemporaries, and whose works – a bridge between an Italian inheritance and a truly German future – laid the foundation for composers who would change the face of western music. Join Jubilate for a programme spanning virtually the entire length of the Baroque era, featuring music that is at turns beautiful, poignant, vivid, and endlessly surprising.