Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Keiser: Brockes Passion

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

Reinhard Keiser (1674-1739) was Germany's first opera composer of significance. In addition to writing over eighty (?) lyric stage works for Hamburg's Goosemarket opera house, as Cantor of Hamburg cathedral he compsed a considerable amount of sacred music. His Passion-oratorio according to St. Mark (1717?) was enormously significant in serving as a model for J. S. Bach's immortal St. Matthew Passion. On Palm Sunday, March 22, 1997 I presented the Christophorus CD recording of Keiser's St. Mark Passion (Brembeck/Parthenia ensemble, my collection).

Keiser also tackled the Passion libretto that Hamburg's literary figure Barthold Heinrich Brockes penned in 1712. Brockes wordbook was widely circulated among composers in Lutheran Northern Germany. Keiser was the first to set it the same year it appeared. George Frideric Handel took it up in 1716. Handel's setting of the Brockes-Passion I have broadcast on two Palm Sundays past, in 1991 and 2009 (McGegan/Capella Savaria, our station's own LP's). Then there's Georg Philipp Telemann's take on the Brockes text. The Harmonia Mundi recording of Telemann's work I broadcast on March 28, 2010 (Jacobs/Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin/RIAS Chamber Chorus, my collection).

This Palm Sunday you get to hear the Keiser Brockes-Passion as released on two CD's courtesy of the Belgian record label Ramée in 2014. Peter van Heyghen conducts the period instrumental ensemble Les Muffati and the voices of Vox Luminis. The solo parts in the Passion are drawn from this choral group.