Weimar

There are masterpieces of music history that are simply forgotten for a while before they are rediscovered in a later era as a mirror of one's own sensitivities. The reasons for this forgetting are manifold - in the case of Paul Dessau's fairy-tale opera Lanzelot, they are probably clearly political.

This new release from CPO celebrates a composer who hardly figures at all in today’s broad cultural memory: Prince Johann Ernst of Saxe-Weimar (1696-1715). His original and brilliant concertos are now being presented in complete form for the first time on cpo, complemented and contextualized by the harpsichord transcriptions of Johann Sebastian Bach based on these works.

Weimar Staatskapelle With ancestry stretching back to late medieval times, the Staatskapelle Weimar has deeper roots than almost any other German musical ensemble. Like many other German orchestras active in the 18th and 19th centuries, it has been associated with a theater, the present-day Deutsches Nationaltheater in Weimar. The orchestra started life well before that, in 1482, as the Herzoglichen Hofkapelle or Ducal Court Ensemble.