Zelenka: Missa Paschalis, ZWV 7 - Handel: Funeral Anthem for Queen Caroline, HWV 264

Description

Between light and darkness, celebration and remembrance, this double album offers a true spiritual journey through two contrasting visions of 18th-century sacred music. Jan Dismas Zelenka's Missa Paschalis ZWV 7, a work still too rarely heard, dialogues with George Frideric Handel's majestic Funeral Anthem for Queen Caroline HWV 264. Performed by the ensembles Zeronove and I pizzicanti under the direction of Lukas Wanner, these works reveal a shared emotional language beyond their aesthetic differences. Zelenka's Easter Mass impresses with its abundant imagination. Harmonic audacities, sudden contrasts of affect, flamboyant vocal virtuosity: the liturgy becomes an inner theater. The Easter joy is never pure external celebration, but a vibrant energy, traversed by impulses and tensions. Grand choral frescoes are answered by passages of an almost chamber-like transparency, where dance and contemplation succeed each other with singular freedom. The Missa Paschalis thus appears as an intensely living, personal, unpredictable work. Composed in 1737 for the funeral of Queen Caroline, Handel's Funeral Anthem belongs to an entirely different atmosphere. Here, grandeur arises from sobriety. Choral monumentality, clarity of lines, and mastery of musical time establish a space of reflection where collective grief gradually transforms into consolation. Far from pathos, Handel achieves an expression of profoundly human nobility.