The time is now at hand

As for all artists, the coronavirus crisis continues to pose a particular challenge for KlangForum Heidelberg: canceled projects and festivals have led to a complete collapse in planned income, which has hit our freelance musicians hard.

At the same time, however, every crisis also offers an opportunity:

Today, we would therefore like to present a very special project that we have developed during this time of crisis to support our help fund – Musicians for Musicians.

In the project “Die Zeit nunmehr vorhanden ist” (The time is now at hand), Christmas chorales (some of them small in format, but written by great masters) are combined with Italian and Franco-Flemish-influenced vocal music of the Renaissance and are linked in an unusual way by texts developed for this project, in which the philosopher Enno Rudolph draws a broad arc from the crisis times of the 17th century to Corona.

Ein ausgewählter Kreis hauptsächlich ortsansässiger Sängerinnen und Sänger der SCHOLA HEIDELBERG hat sich dafür zur Arbeit mit Walter Nußbaum zusammengefunden und tritt in dieser Besetzung erstmalig als Ensemble in Erscheinung: die Countertenöre Franz Vitzthum und Terry Wey, der Tenor Sebastian Hübner und der Bassbariton Matthias Horn sowie die Sopranistin Dorothea Jakob.

A select group of mainly local singers from SCHOLA HEIDELBERG has come together to work with Walter Nußbaum and is appearing as an ensemble for the first time in this line-up: countertenors Franz Vitzthum and Terry Wey, tenor Sebastian Hübner and bass-baritone Matthias Horn, as well as soprano Dorothea Jakob.

SCHOLA HEIDELBERG concert voices

Speaker: Bodo Primus

Texts: Enno Rudolph

Conductor: Walter Nußbaum

"In the music of different eras, especially in the settings of texts that reflect the spirit of the times, we repeatedly encounter the impact of collisions between happiness and unhappiness, hope and despair, redemption and rejection, and—like a cantus firmus—the collision between life and death. This is particularly true of the chorales of the first decades of the post-Reformation period. They reflect the unrest and rift that divided Christian peoples – especially north of the Alps – along confessional lines, triggering confrontations between friend and foe, between terror and tranquility, between war and peace, between suffering and joy. The hostility between the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation in particular – and thus also between two different forms of religious fanaticism and its political consequences – proved to be persistent until the present day. ... Although the spirit of the Reformation emerged victorious in this conflict, behind all these confrontations played out the gigantic conflict of the epochs: the modern age turned against the Middle Ages, and the Reformation was caught between the fronts. The CD avoids dividing the chorales and songs into the two themes of Corona and Christmas. The ... selected Christmas carols ... represent the conflicts described just as vividly as the non-Christmas ones. However, this finding does not conceal the contrast between Corona as a signal and example of doom on the one hand and Christmas as the great symbol of salvation on the other. ... The songs and hymns' references to the spiritual life of the time reveal their significance for the Christmas season during the coronavirus pandemic, thus building a bridge between then and now." (from: Enno Rudolph, concept text, May 2020)

The CD can now be ordered here