Tag: Choral music

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Recording

Wolf: Jesu, deine Passion will ich jetzt bedenken

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Hanna Herfurtner, Marian Dijkhuizen, Georg Poplutz, Mauro Borgioni SATB, Kölner Akademie, directed by Michael Alexander Willens
81:23
cpo 777 999 2

[dropcap]A[/dropcap] native of Thuringia, the little-known Ernst Wilhelm Wolf (1735-1792) studied at the University of Jena, where he became director of the Collegium Musicum in 1756. After periods in Leipzig and Naumberg, he settled in Weimar, where he worked his way through the ranks in the service of the Duchess Anna Amalia, eventually in 1768 being appointed Kapellmeister, a position he would retain for the rest of his life despite Goethe’s dislike of him and an offer from Frederick the Great to succeed C. P. E. Bach at Potsdam. Wolf’s substantial output includes both secular and sacred works, among them no fewer than 35 symphonies and 20 Singspiele, the overriding influence on him being that of his mentor and lifelong friend, C. P. E. Bach.

However it is not C. P. E. Bach who will most strongly be brought to mind by Wolf’s Passion oratorio Jesu, deine Passion will ich jetzt bedenken, but Graun’s Der Tod Jesu  (1755), one of the most frequently performed religious works of the 18th century and one Wolf is said to have learned by heart. Jesu, deine Passion  is likely to be an early work, probably composed during Wolf’s time at Jena. It belongs to the new form of Passion setting that eschews a direct telling of the story as related in the Gospels in favour of a free, often picturesque poetic text that frequently owes much to Enlightenment sentiment. Such texts avoided the unfolding drama of Jesus’ Passion, in favour of a more contemplative, moralizing context placed between fragmentary episodes from it. Thus, for example, in Jesu, deine Passion, a gracious duet for two sopranos is a supplication to Jesus as he hangs on the Cross to be taught forgiveness rather than the reflection on his suffering one might have expected at this point.

Like the Graun that served as its inspiration, the work is a flexible succession of recitative (mostly accompagnato), arioso, aria, chorales and choruses. In addition to the duet there are just three arias, but all are lengthy numbers cast in full da capo  form. Those for soprano and tenor are reflective in character, but that for the bass, the words of Jesus, is a strongly rhetorical number in which the call ‘Hear it, Christians’ is supported by commanding horns on the sole occasion they come to the fore. Perhaps the most striking passage is the penultimate number, divided into 14 brief sections that include alternating the bass’s upbeat arioso ‘Seid getrost’ (Be consoled) as a refrain with tragic canonic interjections for soprano and tenor set to a chorale. While no forgotten masterpiece – there are moments when blandness seems close – Jesu, deine Passion  is overall an affecting and often touching contemplation on the Passion story.

If there are a few reservations about the work itself, there are only minor caveats occasioned by the performance under Michael Alexander Willens, the American director of the Kölner Akademie, who draws from both instrumental and vocal forces a very well-executed and sensitive premiere recording. His soloists, who also sing in the small chorus, are all excellent. Soprano Hanna Herfurtner opens her aria with a lovely messa de voce, though at times her vibrato can be intrusive. The excellent tenor Georg Poplitz has the lion’s share of solo work, projecting recitative with vivid purpose, while also giving his ‘sentimental’, flute-inflected aria a fine sense of line. The alto and bass have less to do, but are both good, and the bass aria referred to above, the most vocally demanding in the work, is notable for some of the best articulation I’ve heard from a bass in some while in the hands of Mauro Borgioni. Definitely well worth investigating.

Brian Robins

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Sheet music

Samuel Michael: Psalmodia Regia (Leipzig, 1632)

Floral design

Recent Researches in the Music of the Baroque Era, 201
Edited by Derek L. Stauff
xxxii + 209pp (plus a facsimile of the tenor part book)
A-R Editions, Inc.
ISBN 978-0-89579-879-4 $230.00

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]ne of the four earliest Leipzig prints of vocal music involving instruments (the others being by Schütz, Schein and the composer’s brother, Tobias), Samuel Michael’s 25 settings of verses from the first 25 psalms is a most important collection. Printed shortly after the liberation of Leipzig by the combined armies of Sweden and Saxony during the Thirty Years War, it contains music for between two and five parts above the basso continuo. These range from vocal duets, through solos or duets with obbligato instruments, up to five voices. They average around the 90 bars in length. The texts reflect the trials and tribulations of the inhabitants of Leipzig (and the German population in general) during the war, while the musical language reveals the increasing influence of Italian music, though really these interesting and worthwhile pieces would stand comparison with Schütz or Schein in concert (or church).

After Stauff’s informative introduction to the composer and the dedicatee of the original print (not something we hear enough about terribly often!), he discusses the context of its creation and publication, goes into some detail about its reception (which seems to have been far more widespread than you might imagine!) before no fewer than five pages of detailed footnotes and the full texts and translations of Michael’s chosen verses. Stauff reveals that a planned second instalment of 25 settings of extracts from Psalms 26-50 does not seem to have materialised – as if Leipzig had not had enough, the composer (and many of his family) fell victim to an outbreak of plague a year after liberation.

While Stauff’s Table 2 is interesting in showing where some of the texts were used in the liturgy of the Lutheran church in various places, the fact that he found no concordances at all for four of them would have been reason enough for me not to feel that this had been the reasoning behind Michael’s print. I would have thought it far more likely that cantors would have chosen pieces from the volume that matched the forces they had available or whose text resonated with a particular sermon or circumstance. Whatever his intentions, Stauff has done an excellent job of making this fine collection of modest works available in clear, practical editions. I hope A-R Editions will make imprints of the individual pieces available to performers who can undertake the next step of re-introducing this fine music to listeners!

Brian Clark

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Recording

Bach: Ein feste Burg

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Sarah Wegener, David Allsopp, Thomas Hobbs, Peter Harvey SATB, Kammerchor Stuttgart, Barockorchester Stuttgart, Frieder Bernius
Carus 83.282
49:03
+ Missa in G minor, BWV235

[dropcap]I[/dropcap] would like to hear Bach’s short masses recorded/performed alongside the cantata movements on which they are based (I’ve done this myself with the F major). There would certainly have been room for such an approach on this rather brief CD. In their own terms, these performances are splendid – the opening ritornello is just gorgeous (JSB is a factor in this, of course) and the star ratings reflect this.

The soloists (three of them English) are equally accomplished in some demanding music – Bach’s re-texting of the cantata arias is not always seamless. I must say that I miss the inauthentic trumpet parts from BWV 80! However, without them, the ear re-focuses from sheer sonic splendour to Bach’s astonishing contrapuntal skill which in these hands is still very much a rewarding musical experience. The booklet contains all that it should, though the English version of the main essay omits some of the interesting contextual information included in the German original.

But there will be those who would have been much happier to hear fewer performers than are on display here – a choir of 21 (7-5-5-4) and orchestra with strings 55321 – expert and impressively unanimous though these are. Conductor Frieder Bernius has been admired for several decades as ‘a pioneer of historical performance practice’. But is ‘historical performance practice’ really what he is offering? It sounds to me more like a modern performance practice using historical instruments.

David Hansell

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San Marco di Venezia – The Golden Age

Floral design

Les Traversées Baroques, Etienne Meyer
72:28
Accent ACC 24345
Music by G. B. Bassani, A. & G. Gabrieli, C. Merulo

[dropcap]H[/dropcap]aving had the considerable honour and pleasure  of rehearsing the music of Giovanni Gabrieli for days at a stretch, surrounded by the Tintorettos of San Rocco, the common sensibilities of these two contemporary artists become clear. This disc captures these parallels very well. Many of his pieces, and particularly the ones chosen to open this programme, start with low voices laying down the dark ground, the tenebrae, over which, layer by layer, voices of increasingly high tessitura build the mannerist drama of the brighter figures. Much of the energy of paintings at this time is communicated by the brush strokes, sometimes eliding apparently separate objects for the sake of pictorial rhythm, sometimes separating objects to clarify detail, where the story calls for it. There were points in the music where I felt that this aspect could have been emphasised, recognising Gabrieli’s absolutely mannerist use of the tensions between melodic and harmonic rhythm to create drama-in-the-moment. The wind playing is artfully crafted and the voices beautifully integrated. Occasionally the colouration used by the top soprano causes her to step apart from the ensemble, reducing rather than enhancing the dramatic tension. This feature was however turned to advantage in the Bassano divisions on Palestrina’s Veni delicte mi, where the mobility of the voice in the long notes becomes more of a piece with the divided notes, avoiding the awkward transitions between (too) static and (too) frenetic passages, which undermines many performances of this genre. This performance was a revelation, integrated in this way. Vocal and instrumental pieces are interspersed by organ solos. These had weight and momentum, played on a strong toned organ with needling quints, and the rhythm of the passagework carried very well over the chord changes. It was a nice touch to finish the disc with three large scale pieces by Bassano, the best player-composer in Gabrieli’s band at St Mark’s. So often eclipsed in modern times by his organ-playing friend, Bassano deserves a wider airing. His famous treatise has given us a window on their performance practices. Listen to this disc to hear them at their best.

Stephen Cassidy

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Stephen Cassidy

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Sheet music

Antonio Salieri: Requiem With Two Related Motets

Pink chrysanthemum

Recent Researches in the Music of the Classical Era, 108
Edited by Jane Schatkin Hettrick
xxv, 4 + 248pp. $360
ISBN 978-0-89579-859-6

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his is Jane Schatkin Hettrick’s fourth Salieri contribution to the RRMCE series, following a mass in D (vol. 39), one in D minor (vol. 65), and a Plenary Mass in C with Te Deum  (vol. 103). Scored for SATB (solo and chorus), two oboes, English horn, two bassoons, trumpets, trombones, timpani, strings and organ, Salieri intended it to be performed at his own funeral (he started writing it in 1804…), along with one of the two motets of the title (Audite vocem magnum dicentem, which in the event was not part of the service; the other work in the volume, probably Salieri’s last, is a smaller-scale motet with string accompaniment only, Spiritus meus attenuabitur). The inclusion of music for English horn seems to follow a Vienna Hofkapelle  tradition, since both Bonno and Eybler used it in their Requiem settings. As one would expect with the distillation of years of study of her subject, the editor presents a clear picture of the works’ histories and a very clean edition. Completists will probably disagree with me, but I don’t fully understand why the clarinet part (a contemporary alternative for the English horn) for the Requiem is printed separately, and even less so why it merits a whole page of critical notes to itself – could those seriously not have been integrated into the main commentary? That is such a minor quibble in the context of such a magnificent volume which will hopefully encourage more performances of Salieri’s neglected music. Perhaps the two smaller works could be made available as off-prints so choirs could have a taster?

Brian Clark

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Recording

Charpentier: Leçons de Ténèbres

Floral design

[Samuel] Boden, [Stéphane] Degout, Arcangelo, [Jonathan] Cohen
73:31
hyperion CDA68171

[dropcap]F[/dropcap]ine performances of fine music are on offer here. The disc’s title is justified in the sense that the three leçons do take up more than half the programme but the preceding works are far more than mere starters. The Litanies, especially, show M-AC at his very best, imaginatively deploying a lush six-part vocal ensemble topped out by two instrumental parts, all under-pinned by continuo, of course. The first and third Tenebrae  pieces are scored for baritone and small ensemble, the second for haute-contre and continuo, from which the gamba sometimes emerges as a melodic foil to the voice. Samuel Boden’s singing of this exquisite music is simply superb – just the right mix of passion and dignity. The booklet essay (Eng/Fre/Ger) tells us what we need to know but the sung Latin texts are translated into English only. This is a notable release.

David Hansell

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Majesté

Floral design

De Lalande: Grands motets
[Emmanuelle De Negri soprano, Dagmar Šašková soprano, Sean Clayton haute-contre, Cyril Auvity tenor, Andre Morsch basse], Ensemble Aedes, Le Poème Harmonique, Vincent Dumestre
74:32
Alpha 968

[dropcap]F[/dropcap]ew composers of grands motets  did grand  with quite the instinct for brilliance of Michel-Richard de Lalande. Even in these relatively early works he displays a sure structural hand as solo récits, ensembles and grand choruses succeed each other in subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) praise to and of kings both divine and earthly. The performing forces are large, though not implausibly so, and the orchestral strings correctly distributed across a single violin line above three viola voices and the basses de violon. Splendid though the two shorter pieces are, they are inevitably over-shadowed by the powerhouse that is the Te Deum  – core repertoire at the Concert Spirituel as well as at court – in which the choral writing reminded me more than once of Handel in ceremonial mode. As usual I wish that the lady soloists could display a little more care over their use of vibrato but the gentlemen are splendid, especially in ensemble. I have in the past found this director a little free-and-easy in matters of performance practice in earlier music and here, too, this is a bit of an issue. I just don’t believe that Lalande ever deployed recorders at the pitch we hear at the opening of the Te Deum. They really don’t add further lustre to what is already a colourful sound: it’s just an annoying squeak to me. But as with pretty much any Lalande programme there is much here that both impresses and gives joy. The booklet offers Fre/Eng/Ger essays but the sung Latin texts are translated into Eng/Fre only.

David Hansell

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Johann Rosenmüller: In te Domine speravi

Floral design

Sacred Concertos on Psalm 31
Weser-Renaissance, Manfred Cordes
62:22
cpo 555 165-2

[dropcap]D[/dropcap]uring the baroque period, it was customary for composers to set the same psalm texts many times as demanded by the liturgical requirements of Vespers services. This typically enterprising recording from Weser-Renaissance under Manfred Cordes brings us seven of the surviving settings of “In you, O Lord, I put my trust”, an especially poignant text for Rosenmüller, whose seemingly meteoric career in Leipzig was cut short in the early 1650s by scandal, and he was forced to live for nearly thirty years in exile. There are three solo versions (one each for soprano and tenor with a pair of violins and continuo, and one for alto with an additional pair of violas), two duets (soprano & alto, alto & tenor, each with violins and continuo), one for pairs of sopranos, tenors and violins, and finally a larger setting for five voices with five instruments. As always with this ensemble, the singing and playing are top notch, and the understanding of the architecture of the music, the pacing, the balance of individual voices and instruments is perfect. On the latter point, Cordes opts for violas da gamba for the middle parts with dulcian on the bottom and organ and chitarrone continuo. For all the praise I’ve lavished on the performances, however, the sources of the music (readily available online) reveal, for example, that the largest setting on the disc should have been much larger – two four-part choruses, one doubled by strings and crowned by a free violin line, the other reinforced by brass with a cornetto on top; perhaps the re-working was necessary on purely financial grounds, but surely it should be mentioned in the booklet notes. Would I rather have this rendition than none? Absolutely!

Brian Clark

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Palestrina: Missa Confitebor tibi Domine

Dark green flowers

Yale Schola Cantorum, David Hill
70:24
hyperion CDA68210
+Benedicta sit sancta Trinitas,* Confitebor tibi Domine, Introduxit me rex,* Loquebantur variis linguis,* Magnificat primi toni & Ricercar del quinto tuono* (*played by Bruce Dickey cornett, and Liuwe Tamminga organ); Ricercar del sesto tuono (organ solo)

[dropcap]I[/dropcap] can still remember being stunned by the 1996 Dorian CD (DIS 80146) of polychoral music by Victoria sung by Saint Clement’s Choir, Philadelphia – I had no idea that American choirs could and did sound so good. We ignore the American choral scene at our peril, as it is a sophisticated and well-financed sector which produces excellent results. Under the direction of David Hill, Yale Schola Cantorum produce a truly beautiful performance of the ordinary of Palestrina’s double-choir Missa Confitebor tibi Domine, preceded by the motet he based it on, the eight-part Magnificat primi toni  and various instrumental goodies. The instrumental works are played by the legendary Bruce Dickey on the cornett and Liuwe Tammingo on the organ, the latter also contributing a solo organ Ricercar. These instrumental tracks were recorded in Bologna, allowing Tammingo access to what sounds like an appropriate period instrument although no details are given, whereas the choral music was recorded in the lavish acoustic of Christ Church, New Haven, Connecticut. Built upon a clearly very dynamic church music tradition at Yale, the Schola Cantorum produce a beautifully refined sound and with David Hill at the helm give an intelligent and thoroughly musical account of Palestrina’s music. Add to this admirable package a cogent and very readable note by the authoritative Noel O’Reagan and the result is extremely impressive in every respect.

D. James Ross

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Categories
Recording

Larmes de Résurrection: Music by Schütz and Schein

Floral design

La Tempête, Simon-Pierre Bestion
77:18
Alpha 394

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his account of Schütz’s Historia der Auferstehung Jesu Christi  intercut with items from Johann Hermann Schein’s Israelsbrünnlein  is not without its controversial aspects. Firstly the idea of presenting the music by the two composers in alternating numbers, one piece often emerging seamlessly from the previous one, is a radical idea. I can’t think the music would ever have been performed in this form at the time, but to my mind it works very well. Also controversial is the choice of the Lebanese singer Georges Abdallah for the Evangelist in the Schütz. He is described as a ‘chantre Byzantin’ and decorates Schütz’s simple recitative with an encrustation of decorative ornaments in the manner of Byzantine chant. Again, there will be those for whom this crosses a red line, but I have to say I found that Schütz’s rather long workaday recits were remarkably animated by this unorthodox (or rather orthodox in its truest sense) approach. The accompanying instruments in both the Schütz and Schein were wonderfully sonorous and expressive, and not backward in decorating their lines and even graphically evoking the dramatic quakes, storms and other circumstances of the text. This is an account which has been much thought about and meticulously prepared and, while I can see that certain aspects are difficult to justify academically, I found the resulting performance powerful, expressive and musically convincing. The wonderfully warm acoustic of the Chapel Royal at Versailles enhances the sound, and I found myself drawn into a remarkably involving account of this great music. My only two gripes are that the Schütz is not performed in its entirety, and that the programme note is in the annoying form of an interview with the director – I find that the disembodied interviewer never asks the questions I would like to have answered.

D. James Ross

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