Search - Judith Gauthier, Marianne Beate Kielland, Adrian Thompson :: Martin: Golgotha

Rembrandt s engraving The Three Crosses inspired Frank Martin s powerful sacred oratorio Golgotha. As Martin explained while he was still working on the score, Once I had seen these etchings, I was positively haunted by the idea
of realizing an image of the Passion with my own resources. Inevitably, Martin s work was influenced by the passions of J.S. Bach, which he had been familiar with since childhood. Golgotha is comprised of ten musical tableaux that relate the story of Christ s Passion. Martin draws on all four Gospels, interspersed with excerpts from the Meditations and Confessions of Augustine of Hippo and individual verses from the Psalms and liturgy for Holy Saturday. The final part of the work is an epilogue, anticipating the events of Easter Day, replacing mourning with hope. Here Martin seems to have captured that strange white light of transfiguration that he so admired in Rembrandt s etching the paradox of a luminous darkness. Daniel Reuss leads the Cappella Amsterdam and a cast of fine soloists in the first new recording of this important work in sixteen years.