Seeing the graphics for this release by Jordi Savall and his Capella Royale de Catalunya and Concert des Nations orchestra, you may not have realized that Bach composed a Markus Passion or St. Mark's Passion to go with his better-known examples. He did, although to say that he "wrote" one would be wrong: a Markus Passion was performed in Leipzig in 1731, and a libretto by Picander (Christian Friedrich Henrici) exists in two different versions. But there is no score. It is thus surmised that Bach, or someone in his circle, ...
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Seeing the graphics for this release by Jordi Savall and his Capella Royale de Catalunya and Concert des Nations orchestra, you may not have realized that Bach composed a Markus Passion or St. Mark's Passion to go with his better-known examples. He did, although to say that he "wrote" one would be wrong: a Markus Passion was performed in Leipzig in 1731, and a libretto by Picander (Christian Friedrich Henrici) exists in two different versions. But there is no score. It is thus surmised that Bach, or someone in his circle, put together a pastiche of suitable music that would fit Picander's text, basing it either on Bach's own earlier music (mostly cantata sections) or music of someone else, perhaps Reinhard Keiser. Attempted realizations of this pastiche go back as far as the 1960s, with one notable version led by Ton Koopman in 1999. Savall's version is all Bach, and it's apparently the first one to take the revised Picander libretto into account; presumably the goal of the tinkering was to make the...
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