News
Passion season
26.03.2008For the Nederlands Kamerkoor the middle of March was entirely taken up by the figure of Johann Sebastian Bach. Not only with two fantastic productions of the St. Matthew Passion in Amsterdam and Rotterdam, but also with the huge amount of attention being attracted by our new CD of Bach’s six motets.
The NRC newspaper wrote of this CD: “The Nederlands Kamerkoor succeeds in maintaining transparency and balance in the vocal texture, even in the most complex passages, such as the numerous fugal sections.”
And the Volkskrant had this to say about the Passion performance with the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra under its new young chief conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin: “Minor miracles were achieved within the orchestral groups. A pair of flutes humbly lowered their heads in the ‘O Mensch’ chorale, the oboe d’amore in stockinged feet genuflected before the Last Supper. This made the natural violence which followed all the more shocking: ‘Sind Blitze, sind Donner’ rushed by at a breakneck tempo and with a theatrical gesture. The NKK contributed precisely phrased singing, given light and shade by means of strong accents.”
The previous week the NKK had enjoyed great success in Amsterdam, in a packed Concertgebouw, with the Combattimento Consort conducted by Jan Willem de Vriend. In Rotterdam they even went one better, in Nézet-Séguin’s particularly impressive performance of the St. Matthew, his first in Holland. One could barely imagine a more intense or more human ritual. The choir enjoyed the collaboration, and received exuberant applause from the audience. In two years’ time we are due to perform the St. John Passion with the RPO – and are already looking forward to it!
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