No 52 MDR concert during the morning

Mendelssohn was able to bring Bach's works closer to the audience of the time through his orchestrations; Leopold Stokowski's orchestrations made a whole series of Bach compositions part of the repertoire of the great modern symphony orchestras. Taneyev, on the other hand, showed an affinity for historical compositional styles, whose polyphonic compositional artistry won the admiration of even his teacher Tchaikovsky. The cantata, which is hardly known in this country, tells of the last hours of John of Damascus in a haunting choral-symphonic movement. In contrast, Shostakovich chose a very secular theme for his cantata, which, in a historicizing way, was a parable of the brutal oppression in his time.