Creation

Becoming and dying, waxing and waning, the great secret of the cosmos of which we are all a part: Joseph Haydn not only bears very personal witness of his reverence for God in his oratorio “The Creation”. This work is also an avowal of the philosophy of the Enlightenment: the biblical fall from grace is absent, the earth is the best of all possible worlds. Haydn describes the creation of it in an incomparable musical language, anticipates in so doing the later idea of programme music and transports the listener to a magically luminous world of images.
It has already become a tradition: For more than ten years now, the Gürzenich Orchestra Cologne has been a guest at Cologne Cathedral once a season to give a concert together with the choirs of Cologne Cathedral Music. Chief conductor François-Xavier Roth and Domkapellmeister Eberhard Metternich alternate in the programming and conducting of the concert. This year, a proven choral expert will take over the musical direction of the concert: the sought-after French conductor Raphaël Pichon.
A prominent trio of soloists, notably the young Swiss soprano Regula Mühlemann, will recount – supported by the Gürzenich Orchestra – the miracle of the transformation of the primeval chaos into an animate, ensouled earthly world.