Küppers

Sunhae Im's uniquely enthralling voice and her extraordinary stage presence have made her one of the worlds leading sopranos in the opera and concert fields. »Ravishing« this is how the Neue Zürcher Zeitung described her very special voice. Under the title of Didone abbandonata she now interprets opera arias and cantatas for cpo, some of them with strings, others with continuo, by Niccolò Jommelli Giovanni Ristori, Johann Adolph Hasse, Nicola Antonio Porpora, and other composers. She is accompanied by Teatro del Mondo, an ensemble that has set itself the task of performing Baroque music tracing its origins to changing times. Dido, the Queen of Carthage who fell in love with Aeneas but whom he then left behind on his voyage from Troy to Rome, is one of the great tragic female figures of antiquity. Operas and some cantatas such as those by Ristori and Faggioli attest to the timeless fascination of this story and to its significance for the Italian Baroque opera.

The close-knit nature of the Bach musical family is documented in many sources. They met regularly for family celebrations, exchanged experiences and, of course, always had an eye on where there was a vacant position. In baroque Central Germany, the name "Bach" was practically synonymous with the job title "musician". For the Ensemble Polyharmonique and Teatro del Mondo with its director Andreas Küppers, too, the "Old Bach Archive" is the most important starting point for the musical representation of Bach's "Family Affairs".

Wie kann der Buchtitel mit einem prägnanten Satz umschrieben werden? Durch Arthur Schopenhauers überlieferte Aussage: „Jeder dumme Junge kann einen Käfer zertreten, aber nicht alle Professoren der Welt können einen herstellen.“

Violinist and conductor Gottfried von der Goltz has gained recognition as the leader of the Freiburger Barockorchester (or "Freiburg Baroque Orchestra"), an innovative historical-performance ensemble. He also performs widely as a violin soloist. Von der Goltz was born in the Bavarian city of Würzburg on June 1, 1964. He studied with his father, Georg Conrad von der Goltz, and his mother, Kirsti Hjort. Von der Goltz studied at the Hochschule für Musik in Hannover under Rami Shevelov, moved to New York for graduate studies at the Juilliard School, and continued taking lessons with Rainer Kussmaul in Freiburg. At age 21, von der Goltz earned a violin chair in the NDR Symphony Orchestra in Hamburg, looking forward to a secure career with a solid German orchestra. Two years later, he relinquished that post in favor of the Baroque violin, in the mid-'80s, not a terribly common instrument in Germany. That led to von der Goltz's leadership of the Freiburger Barockorchester, where he continues, with Kristian Bezuidenhout, to hold the post of artistic director. With the Freiburg group, he has amassed a large catalog of recordings, beginning in 1994 with an album of works by Purcell and Handel.

If one believes the few testimonies that free the life story of the Italian composer Francesco Geminiani (1687-1762) from its historical semi-darkness, then he must have been a true jack-of-all-trades, a spring chicken and a jack of all trades - a musician who was unassimilated by the standards of his time and who did not make things easy for his contemporaries. Later often labelled with the carelessly given epithet "minor master", some of the works of this enterprising and imaginative Italian prove to be extremely fascinating facets in the great musical puzzle that we call "Baroque".

The number of pre-Easter Passion music is immense. However, one is unlikely to encounter such a peculiar approach to the fundamental faith theme of Christianity as in the Rappresentazione sacra al Santissimo Sepolcro, which developed at the Viennese imperial court around the middle of the 17th century: a scenic depiction of the events at the tomb of Christ set to music composed either by the respective court conductor or (from 1660) by His Majesty Leopold I himself