Jan Hus as gospel. In Prague, they will perform an oratorio about a Czech preacher.
From Constance to Prague: A large gospel choir, orchestra and soloist will pay tribute to Jan Hus.
Gospel oratorio for solo, two choirs and orchestra called Truth in Flames will be heard on October 19 from 8 p.m. in the church of St. Simon and Judy in Prague. The composition with the subtitle Requiem for Jan Hus was composed by the German composer Ralf Grössler. After a successful world premiere in Wildeshausen in northern Germany and a series of reruns in other German cities, this remarkable work will now be presented in Prague in its Czech premiere.
The composition will be performed under the direction of the author by the large gospel choir Joyful Voices, the Sinfonic Gospel Orchestra, and the soloist will be the American-German gospel singer Joanne Bell (pictured), who the professional press calls one of the best contemporary representatives of this genre.
Grössler was attracted to Hus’s personality above all by “his unshakable belief in the truth and his effort to assert it, even at the cost of the sacrifice of his own life.” For him, Jan Hus also becomes a symbol of the desire for eternal peace, based on living in truth. The textual oratorios preserve the classical layout of the individual parts of the Mass in Latin and supplement it with biblical texts and quotations from Huss’ work in English and German.
The tour will start symbolically in Constance
In 2017, the whole of Europe commemorated the 500th anniversary of the Reformation and the seminal speech of Martin Luther. German composer and director of the choir at the Evangelical Church of St. Alexander in the northern German town of Wildeshausen, Ralf Grössler also wanted to highlight Luther’s predecessor, the Czech church reformer Jan Hus. He wrote an oratorio that combines “classical” musical parts with gospel singing. After a two-year “covid” delay, this first performance in the city of Jan Hus takes place at the end of the concert tour, which begins on October 16 in Constance, Germany, and symbolically, being in the opposite direction, copies Hus’s journey to the Council of Constance.
Temple of St. Alexandra in Wildeshausen is one of the oldest Romanesque churches in northern Germany. And the quality of the musical practice in this tabernacle far exceeds local boundaries. Ralf Grössler (born 1958), who has been choir director here since 1989, originally comes from Bavaria, but after studying church music in Munich and Bayreuth and several professional stops, he settled in Lower Saxony and led the local church choir and orchestra to a top professional level. But Grössler is also a composer – he wrote his first piece for the organ at the age of 14 – and he was particularly enchanted by gospel in combination with jazz. Already in 1984, he created his first gospel mass, which was followed by other similar works, with which he gradually gained fame throughout Germany.
Tickets for the concert are available via the website www.jan-hus-requiem.cz.
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