by Robert Rollin

On Monday evening March 31, the audience at Trinity Methodist Church in downtown Youngstown witnessed the first modern performance of Carl Philip Emanuel Bach’s Passion According to St. Luke. The piece is actually attributed to Gottfried August Homilius, a student of Johann Sebastian Bach.

Bach’s contribution was to greatly shorten and rearrange the piece by giving Homilius a list of order and key changes, moving some of the vocal parts to different ranges and eliminating the boy soprano part. It was first performed for Easter, 1775, but the manuscript was forgotten for about two hundred years thereafter.

Prior to the performance Youngstown State University Professor Randall Goldberg, who had partnered in editing the new full score with his former professor, David Melamed of Indiana University, presented a pre-concert talk about the piece. [Read more…]