2021/22 Season

Fanie Antonelou Soprano
Anne-Suse Enßle Recorder
Yves Ytier First Violin, Concertmaster

Tickets available for pre-purchase at info@svapingaconsort.com or at the ticket table on the concert evening.

In January we ring in the New Year with a festive panache of opera and instrumental music by three great composers with strong ties to Hamburg’s famed Oper am Gänsemarkt: Reinhard Keiser, Georg Philipp Telemann and Georg Friedrich Händel. At the turn of the 18^th century, this celebrated Hamburg opera house had become the center of early German opera, where Keiser and his contemporaries pioneered a unique kind of musical drama that fused Italian, French, and native German musical traditions. Our singer, the talented soprano Fanie Antelou, will give us a real treat, performing selections from a few of Keiser’s operas as well as from Händel’s Almira, his very first opera written and premiered in Hamburg when he was just 19 years old. The virtuosic recorder player and Svapinga Consort regular Anne-Suse Enßle will also join us to perform Telemann’s Recorder Concerto in C Major.

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Christine Schornsheim Hammerklavier
Sofya Gandilyan Hammerklavier

Free admission, donations welcome!

On Good Friday we will perform Johannes BRAHMS’s German Requiem as part of our third season concert. In this work, for which the composer selected texts from the Luther Bible and the Psalms himself, grief and pain eventually give way to comfort and hope. Its premiere took place in 1868, and as with our own concert, on Good Friday. In 1869 a four-handed version of the Requiems was published, which was prepared by Brahms himself for music-making at home. The soloists and choir parts are performed on the piano in this arrangement.
This performance will feature two proven specialists in harpsichord and historical pianos: Sofya Gandilyan, artistic director of the Svapinga Consort, and Professor Christine Schornsheim.
A particular highlight: You will have the opportunity to hear an original Blüthner piano dating to Brahms’s time, which will be specially transported to Munich from the Black Forest for this concert.

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InVocare:
Charlotte Nachtsheim Soprano
Stefan Steinemann Alto
Daniel Thomson Tenor
Valerio Zanolli Baritone
Svapinga Consort on period instruments

In this last season concert, the Svapinga Consort will join forces with the singers of InVocare to explore works created for the Restoration Theater by two of England’s greatest early theater music composers: Matthew Locke (1621-1677) and his successor Henry Purcell (1659-1695). In their music for the stage, Locke and Purcell’s audacious harmonies and distinctly English approach to counterpoint and drama gave Restoration-era adaptations of works by Shakespeare, Shadwell, Molière, and others what contemporary English diarist Samuel Pepys described as “a strange perfection” through the marriage of comedy, tragedy, music, and dance.

A special emphasis of the project will include work on the original pronunciation of English, a special interest of the InVocare ensemble. This focus on pronunciation will be integrated into the vocal performances as well into declamation of certain texts drawn from the librettos of the different semi-operas (in particular Shadwell’s adaptations of works by Shakespeare.

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Maria Raffaele oboe
Florian Dantel violin
Waleska Sieczkowska viola
Anderson Fiorelli cello
Sofya Gandilyan piano

Thrilled to inaugurate our first full concert season since 2019/2020, our opening season concert celebrates the chamber music of Wolfgang Amadeus MOZART (1756-1791). The works featured in “Pathos and Joy” put on full display the incredible talents of this classical genius, an adept of expressing human emotion in all of its richness and complexity. On the program, masterpieces for oboe, strings, and fortepiano: his effervescent Oboe Quartet in F Major, K. 370, his impassioned Piano Quartet No. 1 in G minor, K. 478, his elegant “Adagio” for English Horn and Strings, K. 580a, and selections from Christian Friedrich Gottlieb SCHWENCKE’s ingenious quintet arrangement of his irrepressible ‘Gran Partita’, the Serenade in B-flat Major, K. 361 for winds and contrabass.

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