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Joachim Carlos Martini, whose parents were German, was born in Valdivia de Chile. After he had returned to Europe with his parents and visited a secondary school, he studied philosophy, German, history, art history, musicology, and music. In Frankfurt on the Main, he attended Horkheimer's and Adorno's lecture courses on musical aesthetics and musical sociology. He studied the conducting of choirs and orchestras as well as the performance of oratorios and operas, his lecturers being Kurt Thomas and Hellmuth Franz. He completed his musical education by attending conducting classes taught by Dean Dixon and Hermann Scherchen.
In 1965, Joachim Carlos Martini, in agreement with the Protestant Church of Hessen and Nassau, founded the junge kantorei, and conducting this choir has been his main occupation for a number of years. At the same time, he is the conductor of the Barockorchester Frankfurt that was founded by him and some friends. The members of this ensemble, who have specialized in historical performing practice, gather from all over Europe to accompany the concerts of the junge kantorei.
In their work, both ensembles concentrate on the oratorios by George Frederick Handel. Conducted by Joachim Carlos Martini, there have been very successful performances of Handel's oratorios "L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato", "Athalia", "Belshazzar", "Esther" (both versions), "Jephtha", "Solomon", "The Messiah", "Saul", "Deborah" and the pasticchios "Nabal", "Tobit" and "Gideon", as well as of several of Handel's minor cantatas and church music like "Eternal source of light divine", the ode to the birthday of Queen Anne, "The ways of Zion do mourn", the mourning ode to the death of Queen Caroline, and the psalm 110 (109), "Dixit Dominus". Furthermore, both ensembles engage in giving less known compositions of the baroque period back to the musical public. The idea behind these latter concerts is the search of lost sounds, comprising, among others, a cappella works and oratorios by Salomone Rossi, Johann Hermann Schein, Marc Antoine Charpentier, Henry Purcell, and Francisco Guerrero.
Joachim Carlos Martini and Judith Freise also founded the Frankfurt archives "Verfolgtes Musikleben in der NS-Zeit" ("Musicians persecuted during National Socialism"); in this context, Martini examined and documented the histories of Jewish musicians in the time of National Socialist terror in a series of publications as well as three exhibitions. In connection with this reappraisal of the German recent past, a number of long-forgotten compositions by Jewish composers, which are impressive examples to music as a form of intellectual resistance, have been won back and sung by the junge kantorei in many concerts. One of these works is "Dies Irae" by Krzysztof Penderecki, an oratorio dedicated to the people murdered in the Auschwitz concentration camps. It was performed by the junge kantorei together with the Hamburger Jugendorchester in Hamburg, with the Orchester der Frankfurter Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst at Frankfurt's Paulskirche, and with the Jugendchor des Gewandhauses zu Leipzig and the Frankfurter Opern- und Museumsorchester in the Frankfurt opera.