With Seelenfrieden, tenor Martin Platz, the lautten compagney Berlin, and their artistic director Wolfgang Katschner present an impressive recording of 17th-century sacred music. The program combines vocal and instrumental works by Johann Philipp Krieger, Heinrich Schütz, Andreas Hammerschmidt, Dietrich Buxtehude, Johann Rosenmüller, and Johann Theile - composers who sought musical forms of expression for comfort, trust, and inner reflection during a time of profound social, political, and religious upheaval. The album focuses on psalm settings and sacred concertos whose texts touch on fundamental existential questions: fear and distress, lamentation and supplication, but also confidence, trust in God, and hope. Martin Platz, a member of the ensemble at the Nuremberg State Theater, interprets these sacred texts with extraordinary clarity and depth. His tenor voice combines a natural, effortless tone with precise articulation and a fine sense of musical rhetoric. The words always retain their weight; emotions are not displayed, but developed organically from the text. The result is an interpretation that is both emotionally immediate and stylistically reflective. The lautten compagney Berlin accompanies and comments on the stylistically confident vocal performance with the tonal transparency and stylistic sovereignty for which the ensemble is internationally renowned. The instrumental sound remains agile, colorful, and breathing; the continuo sensitively nuanced; the lines clearly contoured. Under Wolfgang Katschner's direction, a dialogical musical performance unfolds in which words and sound interpenetrate and deepen each other.
Heinrich Schutz (1585-1672), often regarded as the most important German composer before J.S. Bach, stands as a central figure in the early Baroque. His music blends the expressive intensity of the new Italian style -absorbed during his studies with Giovanni Gabrieli in Venice-with the rigorous counterpoint and textual clarity favored in Protestant Germany. Schutz devoted much of his long career to sacred music, serving as Kapellmeister in Dresden and producing works that profoundly shaped the development of German liturgical composition. Among his most significant contributions are his Passions. Today, three authenticated Passions by Schutz survive: the St. Matthew Passion (1666), the St. Luke Passion (1665), and the St. John Passion (1664). While no St. Mark Passion by Schutz has survived, the existing three form a coherent and deeply expressive trilogy. Schutz's Passions are notable for their austere, devotional character. Unlike later Baroque Passion settings, they contain no instrumental accompaniment beyond the continuo pitch support used for recitative; instead, Schutz employs unaccompanied choral textures to emphasize the solemnity of the narrative. The Evangelist's recitation is delivered in a chant-like, highly inflected recitative, carefully shaped to illuminate the nuances of Luther's German Bible. Turba (crowd) choruses, though similarly unaccompanied, provide dramatic contrast through sudden harmonic shifts, rhythmic intensity, and dynamic changes. The St. John Passion, the most concise, is often admired for it's emotional directness. The St. Luke is more restrained, reflecting that Gospel's narrative tone, while the St. Matthew stands out for it's broader scope and particularly poignant choral writing. Founded in 2000 by the harpsichordist, organist and conductor Matteo Messori, the ensemble Cappella Augustana -composed of excellent European historically-informed singers and instrumentalists -focuses on the relationships between the Italian and Northern European music from the late Renaissance, through the Baroque era up to the Romantic Period. The Evangelist in the recordings is the eminent Gerd Turk.
Heinrich Schutz continued to set himself challenges throughout his long career. Of all the genres of sacred music that he undertook, the oratorio offers us his most contrasting ideas. His Historia der Geburt Jesu Christi (1664) is in many respects the model for the genre that would later be employed by the musicians of Johann Sebastian Bach's generation; the score that Vox Luminis use for this recording has been reconstructed from manuscript sources in the Duben Collection in Uppsala. The album is completed with a number of particularly festive motets for the Christmas period by Heinrich Schutz and his illustrious contemporary Andreas Hammerschmidt.
One of the key German composers before Bach with over 500 surviving individual pieces, Heinrich Schütz mainly composed church music. Credited with bringing the Italian style to Germany, he continued its evolution from the Renaissance into the early Baroque. Despite living most of his long life in Germany, Schütz made two trips to Venice in his twenties. The first was between 1609 and 1613, during which he studied under Giovanni Gabrieli. The second trip occurred in the late 1620s, possibly to meet and study under Monteverdi. These visits significantly influenced Schütz’s music as he blended the ornate and theatrical Venetian style with the more subdued Lutheran tradition. This album explores his solo cantatas alongside examples of the brilliant and virtuosic Venetian-style instrumental music.
In this recording, you will find a dialogue between two of the most essential funerary musical works of the German Baroque.
In 2022, we celebrated Heinrich Schütz, a central figure of the album, on the 350th anniversary of his death. As a culmination of a series of projects around his person and work, this recording wants to serve as a tribute to an extraordinary musical legacy that found in Johann Sebastian Bach, its greatest supporter. The manifest bond between both composers here is seen in the way in which death is shaken and beaten for later, collected from within our soul, be restored and sublimated by two artistic personalities capable of transcending a rich amalgamation of religious, cultural, and musical aspects around the ars moriendi of his time. Schütz’s Musikalische Exequien and Bach’s Actus Tragicus stem from a creative attitude toward death that is very close to home one from the other. Thus, it is not by chance that with their listening, both works fill us with peace and the deep sense of rest with which they do it.
Praetorius & Schutz: Sacred Works in Parallel Settings / Cordes, Weser-Renaissance
CPO
CD
$18.99Jan 06, 2023
In our series "Music from Wolfenbüttel Castle," the sixth concert in the series featured and recorded parallel settings of sacred works by Michael Praetorius and Heinrich Schütz. One does not immediately think of counting the great Dresden composer Heinrich Schütz among the kapellmeisters at the Wolfenbüttel court, and yet he was officially engaged there as "Capellmeister von Haus aus" from 1655 until at least 1666. Michael Praetorius, however, had long since died around this time. By juxtaposing compositions with identical texts (so-called parallel settings) by Praetorius and Schütz, this album makes it possible to compare the styles of these two "heroes of music history". This is particularly appealing inasmuch as the stylistic upheaval at the beginning of the 17th century, which originated in Italy, falls into the creative period of both composers, and it is revealing to observe in what way the new developments influenced the oeuvre of both masters. At the same time, the works of both composers with identical texts are not exactly numerous, which is related to the fact that Praetorius turned to the arrangement of Protestant church hymns to a particularly strong degree, a genre that either interested Schütz little, or that his position at the Dresden court did not offer any occasion to serve.
The first and presumably only performance of the opera Dafne took place in Torgau on April 13, 1627, as part of the festivities celebrating the marriage of the Saxon Duchess Sophie Eleonore and the Hessian Landgrave Georg II. Although the libretto by Martin Opitz appeared in print, virtually nothing of the music has survived. At first glance, the reconstruction of an opera whose music has not survived appears to be a daring undertaking. In fact, however, there are many clues to the structure of the work, so that it was possible to produce something that, although not identical to the original, is very close to it. In all, there are a dozen mostly secular works by Schütz in the present reconstruction by conductor Roland Wilson, making up about half of the entire opera. Says Wilson himself, "You'll hear some glorious pieces by Schütz and his contemporaries that you probably never would have listened to otherwise."
The encounter of different epochs is often the decisive moment of tension in music programs. Chorwerk Ruhr chooses a particularly original path in its latest prank: a central work by Heinrich Schütz is juxtaposed with what Nikolaus Brass, born in 1949, develops from his encounter with the work of arguably the greatest German vocal composer of the early Baroque. Schütz's Musikalische Exequien, a three-part funeral music with German text from 1637, vividly depicts suffering and death, but in accordance with Christian doctrine also gives great space to the certainty of salvation. Nikolaus Brass, as he says, conscious of this certainty, interrogates the music of his revered colleague and responds partly with almost verbatim quotations, partly with strongly contrasting passages from his works Voices 1 and Voices 2. In this new production, these two frame the Exequien as a large central work, again framed by two Schütz mottoes, so that a symmetrical overall arrangement is formed.
Heinrich Schütz spent his whole life searching for that which is new in music. The Symphoniae Sacrae I, which were presented in 1629, also testify to this. Schütz composed them as a result of the impressions made upon him by his second journey to Venice. In addition to the numerous Italian stylistic traits which can be traced back to Monteverdi, the 20 concertos - all in Latin - particularly impress with their great variety of timbres: solo pieces, duets and trios for all voice type are combined with diverse string and wind instruments are are governed by the emotional and expressive world of the text. The recording impressively continues the award-winning Schütz complete recording with the Dresdner Kammerchor conducted by Hans-Christoph Radermann with the customary top-quality soloists such as Dorothee Mields, Felix Schwandtke and others.
Schütz: Geistliche Chormusik / Suzuki, Bach Collegium Japan
BIS
CD
$34.99Nov 01, 1997
REVIEWS: Fanfare (5-6/98, p.204) - "The fifth complete recording of this magnificent collection of motets is astonishing....there is no feeling that the singing is rushed, nor does the diction of the nonnatives sound strange....Highly recommended."
