Bach | Handel | Rameau

This programme brings together three composers all born in the 1680s – Bach, Handel, and Rameau; all crucial in the history of John Eliot Gardiner’s work with the English Baroque Soloists and here showing fascinating facets of their oeuvre.

Handel’s Concerti a due cori contain some of Handel’s most dazzling orchestral writing, pitting different ‘choirs’ of wind and string instruments against each other. Written in the 1747-48, the concerti in fact contain thrilling, technicolour arrangements of movements of Messiah and other earlier works by Handel.

Silete venti was composed around 1724 in London, possibly to a commission from a Roman cardinal. The motet’s Latin text asks the winds to be silent in honour of the singer’s ecstatic adoration of Jesus. It may be a religious work, but Handel calls for all the capabilities of an opera singer – dramatic command, tenderness, sensuality and an exultant virtuosity in the final ‘Alleluia’: qualities ideally suited to one of the world’s leading Handelian sopranos, Lucy Crowe.

The EBS’s brilliant leader, Kati Debretzeni, is the soloist in her own arrangement as a violin concerto of Bach’s E major Harpsichord concerto, BWV 1053, with its sublime central Siciliano, and the concert is completed with collections of toe-tapping dances from Rameau’s operas.

TOUR DATES

Halle aux grains, Toulouse
Thursday 5 November 2020 at 8pm

Opéra Royal, Palace of Versailles
Friday 6 November 2020 at 8pm

Cologne Philharmonie, Cologne
Sunday 8 November 2020 at 8pm