Buxtehude

Danish-German composer Dietrich Buxtehude has an extensive output of vocal music in addition to his far better known canon of organ music. The vocal music is more obscure in that it is such a mixed bag. The oratorios he wrote have gone lost, many pieces relate directly to the organ music in a way that is difficult to divine now and some of the sacred concertos he composed are less than compelling, written for afternoon lunch concerts and not meant as "serious" music.

BUXTEHUDE Trio Sonatas op.1 is the debut album of Québécoise violinist Noémy Gagnon-Lafrenais, who joins forces with viola da gambist Margaret Little and keyboardist Christophe Gauthier to form Ensemble Spinoza and celebrate the seminal work of 17th-century composer Dietrich Buxtehude.

This ‘themed’ programme by Da Pacem derives from a series of concerts devoted to Bach’s infamous journey on foot to hear Buxtehude play. Did he have leave of absence from his employers? Did the four month absence change his style for ever? Buxtehude achieved a staggering synthesis of the polyphonic, numerical and rhetorical traditions of his predecessors with a very personal poetry, taking care to make his music accessible to everyone, from the specialist to the layman. It is not surprising that Bach took him as his model.

This recording offers an unusual selection of Dietrich Buxtehude’s vocal music performed by 2010 Grammy® Award winning ensemble Theatre of Voices conducted by Paul Hillier. Among these rarely heard works with texts in Swedish and Latin, we find cantatas in the form of virtuoso concertos, as well as arias and chorale settings and Buxtehude’s only work in the stile antico, the Missa alla brevis.

Dietrich Buxtehude: Vocal Music, Vol. 1, was the start of an intended series on the Dacapo label of Denmark begun in 1996 and this was the only volume issued. It features Emma Kirkby with John Holloway and Manfred Kraemer on violins, Jaap ter Linden on viola da gamba, and Lars Ulrik Mortensen on organ. Although Buxtehude's Membra Jesu Nostri is rightly considered one of the great choral masterworks of the Baroque era, his other vocal output – numbering more than 120 works – seems to have a problem gaining the same kind of traction in the repertoire that his organ music has long enjoyed, even though plenty of it has been recorded.

Under the Antoine Marchand (that's Ton Koopman in French, or Anthony Merchant in English) imprint of the Challenge Classics label, Dutch early music veteran Ton Koopman recording the large corpus of surviving works by Dietrich Buxtehude, inspired by the tercentary of the composer's death in 1707. All initial indications are that few other musicians could have done this at all, and probably no one could have done it as well.