Following their ICMA award-nominated first album on Resonus (A Courtly Garland for Baroque Trumpet), period ensemble Orpheus Britannicus, with director Andrew Arthur, joins with The Chapel Choir of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and viol consort Newe Vialles for an impelling new recording of Buxtehude’s seminal and ground-breaking cycle of cantatas Membra Jesu nostri. With a distinguished lineup of soloists complementing this magnum opus, Arthur and his musicians give a gripping account of one of the most significant of early-Baroque oratorios. Orpheus Britannicus was founded by Andrew Arthur in 2002. Its players and singers are drawn from some of the UK’s leading performers in their field and the ensemble has developed a reputation for its expressive and historically informed approach to the rich vocal and instrumental chamber repertoire of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

All tracks have been digitally mastered using 24-bit technology.
Includes work(s) for organ by Dietrich Buxtehude. Soloist: Hans Davidsson.

BUXTEHUDE: Chamber Music (Complete), Vol. 1 - 7 Sonatas, Op.

BUXTEHUDE Complete Harpsichord Music • Simone Stella (hpd) • BRILLIANT 94312 (4 CDs: 279:10)


Decisions, decisions. Does one go with the four-CD set here on Brilliant, played with the proper style by Simone Stella, or the competing set—issued piecemeal, as is their wont—on Naxos by Lars Ulrik Mortensen? Although this set is titled Complete Harpsichord Music, it does not include the aria “Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern,” BuxWV 223; the Prelude in G, BuxWV 162; or the Fugue in B?, BuxWV 176, which are in the Mortensen set. That’s because they were originally written for organ, so in a sense Stella is purer.


Be that as it may, there is a great deal to admire here. There’s no question that Stella has the proper Buxtehude style, which is to play with irregular meter and with the parts of both hands slightly out-of-synch much of the time, which creates a weird tension. He also dances and sparkles in several of the allemandes, particularly the one that begins the partida Auf meinen lieben Gott.


Stella is also excellent in the long sets of variations, given the deceiving titles of “arias,” in BuxWV 247 (“More Palatino”), BuxWV 246 (no title), and the more famous “La Capricciosa” (BuxWV 250), an astounding work for its time, a set of 32 variations that can rival some of Bach’s and Mozart’s in originality and complexity. I also love Stella’s daring in occasionally altering the sound of his harpsichord with the damper pedal, which makes the instrument sound very much like a lute. Of course, Mortensen is also a highly skilled harpsichordist, so in many ways I find their work complementary.


One online review of Buxtehude’s keyboard music claims that he wrote “both pedaliter and manualiter works,” but that his most famous pieces are the “praeludia and toccatas in the stylus phantasticus, which intermingles highly unpredictable free sections in virtuosic and idiomatic keyboard styles with more structured fugal sections.” How about that? I suppose this is how you write when you’re trying to impress your college professor, but I doubt whether any readers who are not professional musicians even know what a pedaliter or a manualiter is. (These terms actually refer to the organ, not the harpsichord, “manualiter” meaning works played only using the manuals and not the pedals.) I’m more interested in whether or not the music is creative, surprising, well crafted, and conveys some meaning to the listener. Buxtehude fulfills all those criteria for me, so that is why I love his pieces. Another feature of his work that I admire: There almost never seems to be even one superfluous note in anything he wrote. And yes, I can describe technically what’s going on in the music—how the notes for both hands contrast with or complement one another—without needing to break down a manualiter. I also prefer the description that one of my Fanfare colleagues gave of Buxtehude’s music when he called it “Bach in the raw.” That conveys far more to me than the stylus phantasticus in the pedaliter. How about you?


Perhaps the strongest element in Stella’s favor is the price. On ArkivMusic’s website, Brilliant is selling this boxed set for $19.99, while Mortensen’s single discs sell for $9.99 apiece. As for me, I give a very slight edge to Mortensen in performance quality, but not enough to warrant double the price. I say go for this one.


FANFARE: Lynn René Bayley

Membra Jesu nostri consists of seven cantatas which graphically depict the suffering of Christ and the different parts of his tormented body. The surprising beauty and integrity of the cycle as a whole lies in its combination of the strict Protestant North German style with that of the Italian school, the symbiosis of mystical outbursts and dancing, transparent and almost ethereal textures. The Groningen-based Luthers Bach Ensemble recorded this in spring 2021, at the height of the pandemic, through which they have played as active a part in the city’s cultural scene as possible with socially distanced concerts and music-making. Formed in 2006, the LBE can call upon a pool of highly practiced early-music specialists in both voices and instruments, as well as the longer Dutch history of historically informed performance praxis. The stylistic pedigree of this new recording of Membra Jesu nostri places it alongside the great recordings of the cycle over the course of the last half-century. A fine balance is struck between the solemn piety of the cycle’s text and the assuaging pathos of its expression, with its many striking contrasts of solo and large-scale textures, its passionate outbursts and reflective melismas.