Zürcher Barockorchester

The ZÜRCHER BAROCKORCHESTER was founded by a group of young musicians in 2002. The ensemble’s founding motto ‘musica in audita’ continues to dominate the orchestra’s artistic identity even today: its programming is unusual, at times piquant, or even frivolous. The musicians perform works which can be heard in concerts only very rarely, despite their high compositional quality. Yet the canonic works of the Baroque era also form a crucial element in the orchestra’s repertoire. The latter, however, are performed within new programmatic contexts which present the masterworks in a new light – either by aligning works under a specific motto, by their combination with texts, or by conjoining them with contemporary music. The orchestra plays on historic instruments as they were familiar to the music’s composer, and for whose particular sonic qualities the piece was written. On the basis of recent scholarship, the ZÜRCHER BAROCKORCHESTER considers so-called Early Music as a reflection of its time, but presents the music to its audiences in a manner that transcends the temporal ties of these pieces and makes them seem refreshingly new.