Chapelle Royale, Château de Versailles, Versailles, France

Monteverdi Choir
English Baroque Soloists
John Eliot Gardiner conductor

Programme

J. S. Bach: Mass in B minor BWV232

John Eliot Gardiner’s recordings (1985 and 2015) are regularly cited as benchmarks, revealing a changing approach to a work which rewards infinite exploration. Bach put his Mass together at the end of his life, perhaps mindful of creating a lasting legacy, recycling pieces he had written in the previous decades and welding them together with new music, creating a compendium of all the different styles and approaches that he had taken during 30 or 40 years of music-making.