Holy week, in the Christian church, is a sacred period that begins on Palm Sunday and ends with Easter. This year, it kicks off on March 29 and concludes on April 5. Throughout our classical broadcast on WRTI, we'll hear music of devotion and uplift.
Every morning at 8 a.m., from March 30 to April 3, Breakfast with Bach will spotlight the music that J.S. Bach wrote for Easter and Holy Week. John T.K. Scherch is your host.
Good Friday
On Good Friday — April 18, Noon to 3 p.m. — join us for a complete performance of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. This 2016 recording features Sir John Eliot Gardiner with the Monteverdi Choir, English Baroque Soloists, and Trinity Boys Choir, with James Gilchrist as the Evangelist and Stephan Loges as Jesus.
Elsewhere in our Friday classical broadcast, we'll hear separate Good Friday-themed music, including Anton Bruckner's Christus factus est, as performed by the Latvian Radio Choir; the Good Friday movement from Act III of Richard Wagner's opera Parsifal, as performed by The Philadelphia Orchestra led by Christian Thielemann; and the "Hodie mecum eris in paradiso" sonata from Franz Joseph Haydn's The Seven Last Words of Christ, Op. 51, in a recording by the Emerson String Quartet.
Easter Sunday
For Easter Sunday, April 5, The Philadelphia Orchestra in Concert will broadcast a performance of Handel's Messiah from December 2025. Led by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, this performance features several compelling soloists: soprano Lucy Crowe, countertenor Jakub Józef Orliński, tenor Frédéric Antoun, and baritone Quinn Kelsey.
In his Philadelphia Inquirer review, David Patrick Stearns offered praise for this Messiah, noting that "with the 40-voice Philadelphia Symphonic Choir rather than the cast-of-hundreds Mormon Tabernacle Choir (which recorded the piece with the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1958), Messiah is now relieved of extraneous sound, and reveals more of its once well-hidden essence."
Following the Orchestra broadcast, Melinda Whiting will host a special Easter edition of Sunday Classical until 6 p.m. Among the pieces in this program are the Russian Easter Festival Overture, Op. 36, by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (in a performance by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra); J.S. Bach's Easter Oratorio, BWV 249 (Collegium Vocale Gent, led by Philippe Herreweghe); and Five Mystical Songs: Easter by Ralph Vaughan Williams (the London Philharmonic Orchestra).
All of us at WRTI wish you peace, love and music this Holy Week. Happy Easter!