Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Richter: La deposizione della Croce; Holst: The Hymn of Jesus

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

Easter programming this year picks up right where the two Palm Sunday Passion oratorios leave off. Immediately following the suffering and death of Jesus Christ comes the deposition from the Cross, His interment in the tomb and ultimately the Resurrection. La deposizione della Croce (1748) is also a Passion oratorio, but it focuses on the taking down of Christ's body and the emotional reactions to His demise from close witnesses. The composer Franz Xaver Richter (1709-89) was Bohemian by birth and Catholic by religion. He was a member of the Mannheim School of composers associated with the founder of the famed Mannheim Orchestra, his Bohemian colleague, Johann Stamitz. Richter's style merges the Baroque with the progressive "gallant" style of early Classicism looking toward Gluck. Richter wrote many symphonies; he helped to develop the symphonic form. Later in life he wrote sacred music for Strasbourg cathedral. His Deposition oratorio dates from his earlier Mannheim period. With its Italian language libretto it is like the Lenten oratorios then performed in Vienna, which were essentially Italian opere serie. Richter's La deposizione received its world premiere recording in 2016 for the Czech label Supraphon. Roman Valek directs the Czech Ensemble Baroque Orchestra and Choir and the five vocal soloists.

For an Easter Resurrectional exultation listen next to The Hymn of Jesus (1920) by Gustav Holst. Holst wrote this brief choral work immediately after finishing his famous orchestral suite, The Planets. The dreamy sound seems to pick up where the concluding movement "Neptune, The Mystic" trails off into the Cosmos, so you can imagine The Hymn of Jesus is way out there in Gnostic outer space. Holst himself translated into English verse a second century AD Greek hymn found in the apocryphal Acts of St. John. That great interpreter of English music, Sir Adrian Boult recorded it in 1962 for Decca with the BBC Chorus and BBC Symphony Orchestra. I last broadcast The Hymn of Jesus from a 1989 London CD reissue on Sunday, March 10, 1991.