54th Saintes Festival: La Sportelle on a tour of Leipzig, from Bach to Mendelssohn

This Thursday, July 17 at 6 p.m., the La Sportelle ensemble offers a program of dialogue between the music of Bach and that of Mendelssohn.

The 6 p.m. concert at the abbey church highlights an unlikely event in musical history: how could a composer as admired as Johann Sebastian Bach, in the space of a few decades, become outdated? And yet, at the turn of Mozart and Beethoven's Viennese period, the master's scores, little distributed, were no longer circulating in music salons.

It is to Felix Mendelssohn, born in Leipzig (one of Bach's adopted cities), that the Germans of the early ^19th century owe the restoration of a music that today has its rightful place at the Saintes Festival. The concert by the La Sportelle ensemble offers a dialogue between sacred works by the two composers, from the same Protestant tradition: the cantata. With an almost metronomic alternation, the ear wanders from one to the other, seeking the correspondences and differences between two geniuses who respond to each other: Bach and Mendelssohn.

La Sportelle, Thursday, July 17, at 6 p.m., Abbey Church of the Abbaye aux Dames. Information atmusique.abbayeauxdames.org.