Giovanni Antonini
a conductor abounding in awards and distinctions, is coming to Munich once again, this time with an accent on Bach. Among other things his programme features two Bach cantatas, both written for the current Third Sunday after Trinity. On this evening Munich’s Hercules Hall will, in a manner of speaking, become a church, and the concert stage its altar. A specialist in historically informed performance practice, Maestro Antonini will join forces with the Bavarian Radio Choir and the Bavarian RSO to place his vision of Baroque music on display. The orchestra will perform on modern instruments, but in a style appropriate to the historical era. By profession Antonini is not only a conductor but a master of the recorder, which he views as an extension of his voice: whenever there’s a passage in the score he can’t explain, he takes the recorder in hand and plays what he has in mind. The evening opens with Bach’s First Orchestral Suite in C major (BWV 1066), followed by the cantata “Ach Herr, mich armen Sünder” (BWV 135) and the “Hamburg Symphony” in G major by his second son, Carl Philipp Emanuel (Wq 182/1). The evening ends with the lavishly conceived bipartite cantata “Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis” (BWV 21), which, we are told, was written for Bach’s application to Halle in 1713 and was heard for the first time, at least in part, on the Third Sunday after Trinity in Weimar, as he himself noted in the score.