Fear and trembling are never, but never presented in a single, monotonous tone color! Our characters often go through an
emotional rollercoaster: from deepest despair to sorrow and anger, from flight to fight, from love and longing to sheer insanity. Truly, a painters box full of affects, inviting composers to go wild with musical expression. “Scenes of Horror” is a baroque cabinet of grotesqueries featuring music by Georg Friedrich Handel, Attilio Ariosti, Antonio Vivaldi and Carl Heinrich Graun.

The opera Polydorus penned 289 years ago last found a place in the performance program of the Gänsemarkt Opera in Hamburg in 1735. The libretto by Johann Samuel Müller depicts exchanges of identity, avaricious kings, queens bent on bloodthirsty revenge, and princes who despise their progenitors. The result is a retelling of the Polydorus legend combining Greek mythology and Shakespearean dramatic suspense. Carl Heinrich Graun, one of the best-known opera composers of the eighteenth century, wrote the emotionally moving music. The first performance in modern times by the barockwerk hamburg and the album recording of this opera rarity now being released have once again uncovered this genuinely original work and following the ensemble’s successes in recent years once again guarantee you a very special listening experience.

This month we are happy to present to you a great Passion oratorio that Johann Sebastian Bach in all likelihood pieced together for his last Passion service. He took a work by Carl Heinrich Graun, a composer whom he admired, and expanded it to produce a magnificent two-part Passion. To it he added compositions of his own authorship and others by his friend Georg Philipp Telemann. The result was a pasticcio, a new work consisting of set pieces. This practice was very common during Bach’s times. Both composers on whose works Bach drew were contemporary stars who did not at all object to this practice, especially since they occasionally operated in precisely the same way. The composer Georg Philipp Telemann saw no reason to complain about the reuse of his works. Although we do have quite a bit of background information about the Passion, the riddle surrounding it is only beginning to be solved. Accordingly, Bach scholarship can only hope that additional sources will be found and prove Johann Sebastian Bach’s authorship once and for all. The work perhaps even offers evidence pointing to one of his lost Passions, and it might even be his last Passion oratorio – which, as the current state of research knowledge sees things – can only have been written during the years following 1733.