Maria Raffaele oboe
Olivier Picon horn
Robert Selinger piano

Free admission, donations welcome!

Robert Schumann saw himself as a Ton-Dichter, a “sound poet”: his musical text settings translate images and emotions into sound, creating evocative musical atmospheres even in his purely instrumental works. For example, in Schumann’s Romances the oboe transports the listener into a bucolic paradise, while in his Adagio and Allegro the horn’s strong, heroic sound evokes the excitement of the hunt from dark forests to high mountain peaks. An entire generation of composers followed in Schumann’s wake, writing music of sublime beauty and tempestuous Romanticism waiting to be discovered in this gem of a concert program.

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Robert Selinger harpsichord and direction
Svapinga Consort on historical instruments

Tickets available at www.muenchenticket.de.

Two festive orchestral suites and the Concerto for Harpsichord and Strings in G Minor by Johann Sebastian Bach open the doors to 18th-century Leipzig’s Café Zimmermann: from 1729 to 1739, this was the place where secular music by Bach and his contemporaries was performed twice a week under Bach’s own direction. In this concert, audiences will listen to sounds never before heard in Munich: natural trumpets without holes (or, of course, valves!) and now-rare low string instruments like the agile and eloquent Violoncello da spalla (a small cello played on the shoulder), and the round, full-bodied Basse de Violon (an instrument larger than the cello with French origins).

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Katharina Weber mezzosoprano
Maria Raffaele oboe
Florian Dantel violin
Amy Shen viola
Anderson Fiorelli cello
Robert Selinger fortepiano

Free admission, donations welcome!

Our third season concert centers on the classical contrasts between color and affect typical of the music of Mozart and his contemporaries. In the Gran Partita and the legendary Piano Quartet in G Minor, Mozart explores incredibly different sound worlds and emotional universes. One of his ways of doing this was by taking advantage of the new instruments of his time: the clear, brilliant sound of the sleeker classical oboe and the glittering elegance and rich dynamic capabilities of the recently-invented pianoforte opened new horizons previously unknown to his musical forefathers. The concert will also include a performance of a short cantata for mezzo soprano and English horn (another instrument that came into its own during the classical period) by Mozart’s successor Sigismund Neukomm.

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Robert Selinger harpsichord

Tickets available at www.muenchenticket.de.

On Good Friday, audiences can look forward to a profound musical experience with Robert Selinger’s performance of one of the most interpretatively complex and technically demanding works for keyboard instruments: Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Considered a high point of the composer’s keyboard music, the work is written for a double manual harpsichord. It is the fourth and final installment of his Clavier-Übungen, a systematic collection of compositions for keyboard instruments published between 1731 and 1741. This fourth part brings together learning and beauty in a technically-challenging aria transformed over the course of 30 variations. What is all the more impressive is that with the Goldberg Variations, Bach manages to make complex contrapuntal writing accessible and comprehensible for the listener.

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João Luís Paixão baritone
Luis Martínez Pueyo traverso
Maria Raffaele oboe
Amy Shen violin
NN viola da gamba
Giulio Quirici theorbo
Robert Selinger harpsichord

Free admission, donations welcome!

Our last season concert transports the audience to mid-18th-century France, when the heady dreams of the Enlightenment mixed with the Sun King’s passionate embrace of theater and pageantry—and particular emphasis on gesture and rhetoric—to shape contemporary art forms like opera, ballet, and instrumental music. Here the Svapinga Consort joins forces with singer and actor João Luís Paixão to combine theatrically interpreted texts with secular cantatas and instrumental works by some of the greatest composers of the French Enlightenment: Rameau, Campra, and Clerambault.

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