Evento

Orchestra Seattle | Seattle Chamber Singers: Reverence + Spirituality

Clinton Smith, conductor
Catherine Haight, soprano
Melissa Plagemann, mezzo-soprano
Wesley Rogers, tenor
Stephen Fish, bass-baritone

J.S. Bach: Mass in B Minor, BWV 232

"I chose Bach's Mass in B Minor because the work represents Bach at his best, and as a devout Christian, his most reverent praise of God can be heard through the music," explains Clinton Smith.

Bach completed his Mass in B Minor shortly before his death, drawing upon liturgical music he had composed over the preceding 35 years and assembling these diverse sources into a seamless whole. The work was not performed during Bach's lifetime, and its true purpose remains something of a mystery: it is not particularly well suited for performance in either Lutheran or Catholic religious services.

Perhaps, as with the Goldberg Variations and the Art of the Fugue, Bach intended this late-in-life composition to be a magnum opus, encompassing all he had learned as a composer of religious music. As Bach biographer Karl Geiringer has noted, this monumental mass "belongs to the immortal documents of man's quest for the eternal truths."