Kaviár és lencse

Two masterpieces of late 19th-century French sacred music make up the programme of this concert-hall celebration: Gabriel Fauré’s exquisitely beautiful Requiem and the Clovis Mass by the elderly Charles Gounod. Between the movements of the latter work, the audience will also become acquainted with four further gems from the Gallican tradition of church music, with one composition each by Alexandre Guilmant, Louis Aubert, Camille Saint-Saëns and Théodore Dubois.

One thing we know for certain about the 21st century is that it will be when the survivors of the Holocaust take their last breath. Every single one of them. Slowly but surely, they are leaving us to our own devices. “Do we want to forget what happened, as if it were a bad dream, or do we want to accept the events as human civilization’s greatest trauma?” the author Péter Esterházy once asked.

Attendind a performance of Messiah is always a thrilling experience, but it is especially so when Handel’s work – which has become a national classic in England – is performed by a dedicated ensemble like the legendary German flagship of the international early-music scene: the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, now with over 44 years of history behind it. The storied chamber orchestra will perform with one of the world’s finest mixed choirs, the RIAS Kammerchor, which also hails from Berlin and was founded in the years immediately following the Second World War.