May 8, 1954, saw the birth of the Cappella Coloniensis, formed by the Cologne broadcasting station then know as Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk as a period-performance orchestra. The WDR Cappella Coloniensis works with such conductors as Bruno Weil, William Christie, Joshua Rifkin, Andreas Spering, Reinhard Goebel, Michael Schneider, Gabriele Ferro, Ferdinand Leitner, Hans-Martin Linde and its founding conductor August Wenziger. Modeled on the mid-eighteenth -century Dresden Hofkapelle, the ensemble tends to concentrate on the early and high Classical era. The orchestra extended its range in the 1970s and 1980s into 19th-century repertoire with highly acclaimed recordings of Rossini operas.
The Cappella Coloniensis toured particularly actively in the first twenty years of its existence, notably to Scandinavia, Switzerland, the Soviet Union and outside Europe to South America, Canada, the USA and the
Far East. These days, the ensemble tends to stay within the WDR's catchment area. WDR recordings featuring the Cappella Coloniensis have been released commercially since the late Seventies, with a series of some 20 CDs being released in the early 1990s as the "Cappella edition". The world première recording of Johan Christian Bach's opera Endimione, conducted by Bruno Weil, was released in November 1999 and won the ECHO Klassik award for its category in 1000. At the 2000 Beethoven Festival in Bonn, Cappella Coloniensis performed works including the so-called
Bonn Beethoven cantata by Franz Liszt, thus venturing into the terrain of music from the High Romantic era with original instruments for the first time. Together with the world-famous soprano Sumi Jo, Cappella Coloniensis made a TV and CD production f Christmas music, and the ensemble recorded Beethoven piano concertos with the French pianist Patrick Cohen. In March 2001 they released the one-act operas Zéphyre and La Guirlande by Jean-Philippe Rameau, conducted by William Christie, and in June of that year, WDR Cappella Coloniensis presented Carl Maria von Weber's Der Freischütz in a historic performance, conducted by Bruno Weil. May 2002 saw the release of the world première recording of secular cantatas by Joseph Haydn, played under the baton of Andreas Spering. Two years later, the orchestra recorded the original version of Richard Wagner's Flying Dutchman.
(Artist photo: Conductor Christopher Moulds)
