A bright fanfare of trumpets and drums opens Bach’s Easter Oratorio. “It’s so joyful,” Madeleine Easton tells me over coffee in Sydney, where she has returned from the UK to establish a new historically informed performance ensemble, the Bach Akedemie Australia. “It gets everyone dancing in the aisles.”
The band’s inaugural offering, at the end of April, will be a programme that includes Bach’s Cantata BWV4 – Christ lag in Todes Banden – and his Concerto for Oboe and Violin, BWV1060. But for Easton, who has led the English Baroque Soloists for many years under the baton of Sir John Eliot Gardiner – patron of her new Bach Akedemie – the Easter Oratorio is an ambition that she hopes to achieve in 2018.
“It’s hardly ever played,” she says. “It’s lesser known even than the Christmas Oratorio – and people don’t usually perform the complete Christmas Oratorio either because it’s six separate cantatas and it goes for hours. This is only 40 minutes long and it’s just a boutique jewel of an oratorio. It’s halfway between the massive oratorios and a cantata in terms of scale.”
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