Title: Vesperae - Baroque Vespers At Stift Heiligenkreuz
Oehms Classics
CD
$9.99$19.99Save 50%Jun 28, 2011
he music of the Stift Heiligenkreuz in the Vienna woods became known throughout the world a few years ago: the CD “Chant – Music for Paradise”, on which Cistercian monks from the monastery sang Gregorian chorals, became an international chart success. On this CD, the esoteric aspect of contemplative sacred vocal music is less prominent; the focus is rather on the power of the vocal and instrumental works of the baroque age that are linked liturgically. In fact, a brother of the monastery wrote some extremely important compositions as early as the 17th century; one of the places in which he published them was the collection “Cultus Harmonicus”. From the works of Father Alberich Mazak, the musical form of a baroque liturgical mass at the Stift Heiligenkreuz can also be reconstructed and this has been complemented on the CD by pieces from other composers of the 17th century. Leading the way here is the ensemble dolce risonanza, the founder and conductor of which, Florian Wieninger, reconstructed the vespers for Holy Cross Day (Exaltatione Sanctae Crucis, 14 September). The CD therefore offers a variety of ways of approaching the music: celebrate solemn vespers in the company of the dolce risonanza ensemble and the monks of the Stift Heiligenkreuz while you discover the works of an Austrian composer that were almost unknown until now and which have been preserved in the library of the Stift Heiligenkreuz.
The sombre colours of Schütz’s moving funeral music are finely brought out in this collection, which also includes several varied smaller settings of standard liturgical texts. The resonant acoustic enhances the inventiveness of the writing. Performance: 5 (out of 5); Sound: 5 (out of 5)
For the third time on the Phi label, Philippe Herreweghe gives us the opportunity to (re)discover three cantatas by Johann Sebastian Bach – Nimm von uns, Herr, du treuer Gott, BWV 101, Ihr werdet weinen und heulen, BWV 103 and Mache dich, mein Geist, bereit, BWV 115. After two albums of cantatas written during the composer’s first year in Leipzig (LPH006 and LPH012), the Belgian conductor and his Collegium Vocale Gent, orchestra and choir, will be performing three cantatas he composed during his second year as Kantor at St Thomas’s. The choir and vocal soloists are once again challenged to produce performances of subtlety and refined virtuosity, and the instrumentarium is as rich and colourful as those heard previously in this series. This album, a genuine delight for aficionados and novices alike, precedes a further disc of cantatas which will be released in spring 2018.
‘Vom Himmel hoch, da komm ich her’ is a new CD featuring organ music with which to celebrate the Christmas season. + Works by Bach, Brahms and Barber stand alongside lesser-known works by composers including Alexandre Guilmant (1837-1911), Otto Malling (1848-1915) and Flor Peeters (1903-86), making for an interesting and diverse holiday listening experience. + Michael Hartmann (b. 1955), organist, lecturer and artistic director, is the featured performer on the Oehms Classics release.
Christoph Graupner: Das Leiden Jesu - Passion Cantatas IV
CPO
CD
$18.99Jul 10, 2020
The present recording of Christoph Graupner's Passion Cycle of 1741 concludes on Vol. 4 with the highly expressive cantata for Laetare Sunday GWV 1123-41. Laetare Sunday ("Joy" or "Refreshment" Sunday), the fourth Lenten Sunday, actually assumes a certain special positive status with it's central focus on God's action, which alone can rid human beings of their failings. However, Johann Conrad Lichtenberg, the author of the text, had a different view: here the dominant theme is the inequity of the rulers and judges who pronounce on Jesus while he bears everything with patience. In the end the verdict concerns the collective guilt of humankind, for which there initially seems to be no remedy. Here two things stand out: the decision in favor of two duets (instead of two arias) and the instrumentation of the cantata as a whole. The blend of instrumental color renders audible what is a direct musical realization of the textual content. The selection of chorales from Graupner's oeuvre between 1713 and 1751 illustrates the extraordinary variety of his compositional production, and the constantly changing coloration brought about by the nuanced instrumentation conveys this to the listener with special clarity. "The Baroque boom - here it in fact has brought new gems to light" (klassik-heute. Com of Vol. 3).
Isfried Kayser (1712-1771) spent almost his entire life in the Premonstratensian Abbey marchtal, where he soon gained a reputation as an especially versatile musician. Numerous spiritual organizations commissioned church music or sacred music dramas. As a play of words on his surname (Kaiser - Emperor), his confreres soon called him the ''Caesar of Music.'' His Magnificat and the Missa VI are presented here in a recording together with several smaller works; they document Kayser's extraordinary accomplishments. These majestically sacred works are interpreted by the Orpheus Vokalensemble and Ars Antiqua Austria under the direction of Jurgen Essl.
By modern standards, Thomas Muntzer might be described as a liberation theologian. A few years before his violent death, the ordained priest married a former nun (like Martin Luther), devoted himself to helping the needy, and ultimately became actively involved in the Peasants' War-actions that alienated him from both the secular authorities and Luther himself. Muntzer, an impassioned advocate for the oppressed, met his end on the executioner's block in 1525. On May 27, 2025, the 500th anniversary of his execution will be commemorated. To mark the occasion, the vocal ensemble Amarcord presents two works Muntzer created as part of his liturgical reforms: the first German-language Christmas Mass and the Amt (Office) and Matins for Easter. Muntzer translated the texts from Latin into German, aligning them with traditional chorale melodies. The result is a deeply contemplative experience, lasting over 75 minutes.
Veni sancte spiritus: Festive Cantatas / Max, Das Kleine Konzert
CPO
CD
$18.99Jan 20, 2017
The Twenty-Second Magdeburg Telemann Festival Days in March 2014 celebrated the three hundredth anniversary of the birth of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Telemann's godson and successor, with a program entitled "Generations: Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and Georg Philipp Telemann." The festival program offered concertgoers the opportunity to experience the similarities and differences in the music of these protagonists representing two compositional generations and traced lines of development in musical style. The live concert recording presented here features sacred compositions by Telemann and Bach written about the same time for Hamburg, some of which were first performed in modern times at the Magdeburg Telemann Festival Days. The Hamburg music director Telemann maintained intensive contact with composers of the younger generation into the late years of his life, exchanged ideas with them, and was interested in developments in the new musical style being formed by them. For their part, younger composers looked up – not without great veneration – to the "father of music" (Johann Heinrich Rolle, 1767) and intensively studied or performed his compositions, which left their mark on German music life over many decades. Among Telemann's contacts, those with his godson and later successor Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach are especially significant. A great part of the church compositions brought together here, all of them connected with the liturgical performance of music at Hamburg's five principal churches, number among the documents attesting to their relationship.
Bach: Secular Cantatas, Vol. 10: Cantatas of Contentment / Suzuki, Bach Collegium Japan
BIS
SACD
$10.99$21.99Save 50%Sep 07, 2018
Robert von Bahr, CEO of BIS Records, writes of this release: “When we finished the Bach Sacred Cantatas there was an emptiness with us all participants, which was - partly - alleviated by the fact that there were several records of secular Cantatas still to be recorded. And now we are at the bitter end of those as well, and there are no more Bach Cantatas to be recorded. After 23 years of a steady diet of Bach Cantatas, to be without them is brutal and cruel. All the better, then, that we have finished on a high point. Carolyn Sampson’s singing in the solo cantata BWV 204 beggars belief - it is as close to Heaven one can hope to come on this Earth. Big words, and yet too small for what she does. This is the crowning glory of a series that has transformed my life and given me so much more fulfillment that I could possibly have hoped for. Thank you, Masaaki and your faithful BCJ, for creating a musical treasure possible to be treasured by a grateful mankind.”
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REVIEWS:
This issue completes one of the great modern recording odysseys, being the final disc of complete surviving secular cantatas from Bach Collegium Japan. The Bach Collegium Japan sing and play as satisfyingly as they have done since their foundation in 1990 and the hero of the disc, as ever, is Masaaki Suzuki. His sense of the tempo giusto in this music is unerring, and his response to the sprightly dance measures is always infectious.
– MusicWeb International
We celebrate here, as always, many of Suzuki’s finest qualities of expressive lucidity, unforced coherence, and the quiet nobility of one serving the music as the most natural of reflexes.
Carolyn Sampson’s ever-inspiring contributions close the project with Ich bin in mir vernügt, a little-known solo soprano cantata compared to the Nos 51, 199, and 210s of this world. Just when one thought it impossible to hear Bach sung any better than in her recent performance of No 105 (arr. Schumann—Ondine, 8/18), she brings an Arcadian coloration to ‘Meine Seele sei vernügt’, placing her among the finest exponents on record of this composer’s peerlessly demanding soprano-writing.
The new collaboration between OehmsClassics and Christoph Spering with the Chorus Musicus Cologne and Das Neue Orchester also resulted in a new encounter with a veteran artist of our label: Thomas E. Bauer. Label director Dieter Oehms stated, briefly and succinctly, that he had never before in his life heard the cantata Ich will den Kreuzstab gerne tragen performed as urgently as in the interpretation of Bauer.
Schütz: Matthäuspassion & Other Vocal Works (St. Matthew Pas
Carus
CD
$20.99Mar 10, 2015
Volume 11 of the Carus recording project documenting Heinrich Schütz's complete works presents the composer's Matthäuspassion SWV 479 (St. Matthew Passion). Schütz, who lived well into his eighties, wrote this magnificent edifice in his last decade of life. A compellingly austere work not yet full-throated in it's overt emotionalism, it is supplemented with additional pieces for Passiontide, including the Litania SWV 458. Under the direction of Hans-Christoph Rademann, the Dresdner Kammerchor performs together with soloists Georg Poplutz (as Evangelist) and Felix Rumpf (as Jesus)
Wagner: Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg, WWV 96 (Sung in Ital
Datum
CD
$55.99Mar 09, 2018
An overall glance at the history of opera shows that in many ways, the growth of multinational record companies after the end of the Second World War has had far-reaching effects. Up till then the national singing schools controlled the scene and nothing could have been more logical than for Italian, German, Russian and French singers to perform mainly in their own language. The language an opera was staged in depended on where the opera was being performed. For example: Boris Godunov wasput on in Russian at the Bolshoi, in Italian at the Scala, in French at the Opera, in German at the Staatsoper in Vienna, in English at Covent Garden and in English or Italian at the Met, depending on which company was performing. This release, despite it's 1962 recording, follows that same tradition of singing the presented opera in the language of the country in which it is being performed. In this case, Italian.
Christus der Erloser concludes Friedrich Schneider's (1786-1853) monumental Christ trilogy. In the 1820s, the Dessau court conductor had planned to depict the life of Jesus in a series of four oratorios - a project he did not complete, but which nevertheless resulted in three complete works: Christ the Child (published in 2022), Christ the Master (published in 2023), and Christ the Redeemer, in which Schneider turns his attention to the Passion of Christ. The work testifies to Schneider's great dramatic sensibility, his deep religious conviction, and his mastery of choir and orchestra.
In dulci jubilo - Christmas Concert by Michael Praetorius / Creed, SWR Vokalensemble Stuttgart
SWR
CD
$10.49$20.99Save 50%Sep 10, 2021
Michael Praetorius saw his most important mission as a composer in the promoting and spreading of the German-language chorale. His collection Musae Sioniae consists of altogether nine volumes and is virtually a complete edition of the Lutheran chorales in every setting imaginable. The Christmas hymns in Musae Sioniae, today just as popular as in that time, were of particular importance for Praetorius. He took greatest care in handling them and presented them often in many different settings. Most of the Christmas hymns selected for this album are also to be heard in different settings, from ornate bicinia and tricinia (in which only two or three of the same voices are used) to magnificent polychorals with two or three choirs, the choral texture so masterful that even the most complicated counterpoint is clearly audible.
LASSUS Prophetiae Sibyllarum. Omnes de Saba. Jerusalem plantabis. Sidus ex claro veniens. Cum natus esset Jesus. Descendit sicut pluvia. Mirabile mysterium. Verbum caro. Jubilemus singuli. Resonet in laudibus • Manfred Cordes, dir; Weser-Renaissance Bremen • CPO 777468-2 (64:44 Text and Translation)
The Sibylline Prophecies constitutes one of the most familiar works of Lassus. I know of 11 previous recordings, including one that Alpha has not sent for review, and most recently Walter Testolin (Fanfare 31:2) was praised for his interpretation. Like several other versions, this one offers one voice to a part, unaccompanied (except for a harp) like the last five issues. But in a program unlike any previous version, the movements are sung in pairs with a motet inserted after each pair to break up the sequence, and all the motets include an instrumental ensemble. The motets are set for five to eight voices, and the parts are distributed in various combinations among the six singers and seven players. At one end of the spectrum, Jerusalem plantabis and Descendit sicut pluvia have one singer and four players, while Sidus ex claro veniens has five singers with harp and Jubilemus singuli has six singers with harp. The others are more elaborate. All are Christmas motets complementing the theme of the prophecies, which were written in the composer’s time as a Humanist revival of the Classical pagan sibyls, who had long been seen as pagan prophets of the coming of Christ.
Manfred Cordes suggests in his notes that the chromaticism of the main work does not wear well, militating against listening straight through, hence his decision to insert the relief provided by the contrasting motets. This is a good notion and it distinguishes this set from the competition. The first and last motets are the most familiar, and Cum natus esset Jesus was on a Hilliard Ensemble disc, but the rest may possibly be first recordings. Cordes has been giving us a dependable run of recordings on this label, including a recent Lassus disc (31:1), so there are probably readers already prepared to grab this one. The singing and playing are admirable.
