For the end of year 2019 the RTS Symphony Orchestra and Choir have once again prepared an outstanding musical spectacle, a pre-New Year’s concert featuring Johann Sebastian Bach’s monumental score – “Christmas Oratorio”. The performance of this piece will include Ivana Lazar, soprano (Croatia), Sonja Runje, mezzo-soprano (Croatia), Leif Arun Solén, tenor (Sweden) and Sreten Manojlovic, bass (Serbia), artists with significant experience in interpreting vocal-instrumental scores.

The guest concertmaster of the RTS Symphony Orchestra will be Sreten Krstic, the first concertmaster of the Munich Philharmonic. Soloists that will also appear are Tomas Ruge, the first cellist of the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra, Goran Kostic, former double bassist of the Bern Symphony Orchestra, as well as Dušan Toroman, playing organ, and Darko Karajić, playing theorbo, artists with a special affinity for Baroque music and instruments characteristic for that era.

The grand artistic ensemble at the concert announced for the 28th of December, at the Great Hall of Ilija M. Kolarac Endowment at 8 pm, will be led by maestro Bojan Suđić.

Johann Sebastian Bach’s Christmas Oratorio is a truly comprehensive piece, and a powerful one in terms of depth of expression. It is envisioned as a kind of a spiritual suite, composed out of sequences of larger segments, written for specific spiritual holidays, subsequently creating a unique form. The piece was named by the composer himself, explaining the name with the fact that writings describing the birth of Christ served as inspiration. So, in fact this is not a real oratorio, based on one biblical story, it is a collection of stories about the birth of Christ which were, according to Luke the Evangelist’s tradition, prepared by Bach’s librettist Picander. It is for this reason that the piece shouldn’t be considered as a single unit, but rather as a sequence of six cantatas, written in year 1734 by Bach for New Year’s celebrations, i.e. the first, second and third day of Christmas, for New Year’s, for the first week after New Year’s and Three Kings’ Day. It is rounded-up in a liturgical-thematical sense but not in the artistic sense, so it is rarely performed in its integral form.

In the Christmas Oratorio we once again recognize Bach – the great master, unsurpassable in vocal and instrumental polyphony, which made his piece famous and left it for future generations.