Balthasar-Neumann-Ensemble

The Balthasar Neumann Ensemble is made up of top notch from several countries. In recent years it has acquired a sterling reputation under its artistic director, Thomas Hengelbrock. Critics place it among the outstanding baroque ensembles and stress the unusual intensity and expressiveness of its playing. Its repertoire ranges from the early baroque to the modern era, always played on instruments appropriate to the music. The ensemble focuses primarily on the music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The close cooperation between the Balthasar Neumann Ensemble and the like-named chorus has given rise to unusual concert programs, semistaged performances, and theatrical productions. The main emphasis of its concert activities falls on the performance of rarely heard works, many of which have never been published. The chorus and ensemble have their own concert series at Southwest German Radio – “Adventures in Music” – in which they lead their listeners along untrodden musical byways through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was this series that witnessed the first modern performance of Antonio Lotti’s Requiem, now available in an award-winning CD recording. The ensemble takes its name from the leading German architect of the baroque, Balthasar Neumann (1687–1753), the creator of the residential palaces in Würzburg and Schönbornslust and the pilgrimage church of Vierzehnheiligen.