Recording from 19. Dec 2018

Bach: Christmas Oratorio

Life-giving and joy-enhancing!

‘There is no more life-giving, joy-enhancing experience in Bach’s music than a great performance of the Christmas Oratorio,’ writes the composer’s biographer Nicholas Kenyon.

Baroque music specialist and artistic director of the Innsbruck Early Music Festival, Alessandro De Marchi conducts Bach’s cycle of cantatas recounting the Christmas narrative from the expectation of Christ’s birth to his infancy.

Soloists from near and far join the Orchestra, Edvard Grieg Kor and Bergen Philharmonic Chorus for this traversal of the first three cantatas in the cycle. They are works that tell of hopefulness and expectation in music that is playful, expressive and exultant, somewhere between the devotional and the operatic, both stirring and contemporary.