In the first week of November, after All Souls’ Day, when the weather is at its bleakest and our thoughts go to those we have lost, conductor Reinhard Goebel presents a programme full of comforting funeral music.

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The conductor steers clear of pieces such as Mozart’s Requiem, but – as is often his habit – digs deep into the less explored oeuvre of Wolfgang Amadeus’ contemporaries Joseph Martin Kraus and Giovanni Paisiello. Both men wrote their own Sinfonia funebre that bathes in a reassuring melancholy. Goebel links these two eponymous pieces to Antonio Vivaldi’s Concerto funebre, and to music by Fasch and Corrette: haunting dirges from the conductor’s beloved Baroque period.

Reinhard Goebel founded the progressive and instantly renowned Musica Antiqua Köln in the 1980s. In recent decades, the conductor and his ensemble have constantly set the bar for historical performance practices. With an unprecedented musical sensitivity, idiosyncratic interpretations, extremely thorough professional knowledge and, above all, an insatiable desire to discover new early music, he conducted his way straight to the top.

After his first time here in a programme around Bach, we are very honoured that Reinhard Goebel will be joining our orchestra again this season.