Chapel Choir Tour to Germany
Herrnhut, Dresden, Leipzig, Erfurt, Rudolstadt and Römhild
31 March – 5 April 2017
Whan that Aprille with his shoures sotte
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote…
So priketh hem nature in hir corages;
Than longen folk to goo on pilgrimages.
At times, it did feel more like a pilgrimage
than a choir tour. Dresden, still rebuilding
its baroque glories from the rubble with
a sense of reconciliation and hope; the
Thomaskirche in Leipzig, where JS Bach
spent the last twenty-seven years of his
career and where he now rests beneath a
bronze slab in the chancel; the Bachhaus
in Eisenach, a fabulous museum dedicated
to the great composer’s life and works,
overlooked by the Wartburg on its
Wagnerian crag where Martin Luther
produced the German translation of the
Bible that kicked off the Reformation: all
Zinzendorf
this, and the pleasure of hearing a series
of outstanding concerts and services by
Winchester College Chapel Choir linking
one place to the next!
Malcolm Archer had put together a rich
programme of music starting with the
austere delights of Palestrina’s Missa Brevis,
passing through Byrd’s Ave verum corpus
and Civitas sancti tui, and on to Lotti’s
devastating Crucifixus: this last proving so
intense during the final concert in Römhild
that a member of the audience fainted
clean away. We had Buxtehude, Leighton
Frauenkirche, Dresden
Malcolm Chillaxing
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