The Munich specialist for early music and artistic director of the Inter-national Gluck Festival in Nuremberg, Michael Hofstetter, is making his debut as guest conductor of the Bavarian Radio Chorus. With works by Orlando di Lasso, Michael Praetorius, Giovanni Gabrieli and the contemporary composer Richard van Schoor, he makes a wide range from the Renaissance to the modern era. "Holy Spirit, come down" - this is how the text of the Christian Whitsun hymn begins, the words of which refer to traditions of cultural and linguistic diversity. The polychoral works in the production are also polyphonic. The first part features works from the Renaissance and Baroque periods, including the composition "Veni creator spiritus" by Orlando di Lasso from 1568, which gives the production its name. The underlying text is, however, more than 1000 years old; The hymn was probably written on the occasion of the Council of Aachen in 809 by the polymath Benedictine Rabanus Maurus, who was a teacher at the monastery school in Fulda at the time. It is one of the few prayers in the liturgy of the Western Church that is addressed directly to the Holy Spirit. The work has been used in the Liturgy of the Hours as a hymn for vespers since the 10th century at the latest, and to this day it is impossible to imagine any Pentecost devine without it. "Veni creator spiritus" is also sung when the cardinals enter the conclave. The South African composer Richard van Schoor has taken the theme of the "Holy Spirit" further into our time in his new motet "The World Is Wept" to verses by Bishop Desmond Tutu.
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