Die Sieben Letzten Worte

This recording is the result of a project launched a few years ago by the Brühl Castle Concerts series (Brühler Schlosskonzerte) and Capella Augustina within the framework of the Haydn Festival, which they organize. We commission works that are related in a certain manner with the oeuvre of Joseph Haydn and are explicitly conceived for an orchestra playing on period instruments. In 2018, we commissioned a piece from Spanish composer José Maria Sánchez-Verdú, one of whose works I had the privilege of premiering a while back: a mesmerizing, fantastically well-orchestrated work. Born in Andalusia, Sánchez-Verdú chose to enact a new musical encounter with Haydn's work Die sieben letzten Worte unseres Erlösers am Kreuze (The Seven Last Words of Our Savior on the Cross). Indeed, as is well known, Haydn wrote Die sieben letzten Worte for a passion liturgy held on Good Friday in the Spanish port town of Cádiz. Sánchez-Verdú has written Sheba (the Hebrew word for seven) as a series of interludes to be inserted between the movements of Haydn's original work. Each of Haydn's seven sonatas is followed by a 2-to-3-minute movement that serves as a commentary, an exegesis, a prolongation, or an antithesis to what has been previously heard. Sánchez-Verdú's seventh and final movement leads without pause into the earthquake music that closes Die sieben letzten Worte. Sánchez-Verdú occasionally takes an isolated chord or timbre from Die sieben letzten Worte as a point of departure; in other cases, he has found inspiration in one of Haydn's musical impulses or gestures. In the process of composing Sheba, the period instruments served as a challenge and as a stimulus... (Excerpt from the booklet notes by Andreas Spering)