Christopher Wards Lieblingsstück
This time Christopher Ward talks about his favorite song. Only two more times you can experience him as conductor of Jörg Widmann’s opera BABYLON – tonight and on 24th of March.
„When I need to detox musically, I head straight for this recording. Opera and orchestral works are complex worlds with all their various elements and emotions. This music, however, is pure and transcendent, and inspires a breathtaking precision in both the simplicity and complexity of its musical language. It also links many eras in my life – the Sixteen gave some of its first concerts in my grandfather‘s parish church (I sometimes bump into Harry Christophers walking the dog in the English countryside on rare visits home!), and I used to love to sing this work both as a young chorister in Oxford, and later conduct it when I later returned there as an organ scholar. On a recent visit back to my old college, listening to such music in a magnificent Gothic chapel, it felt not only like a home coming, but also as though the gates of some musical heaven had been briefly flung wide open!“
Text by Christopher Ward