Conscience Incorporated

Although he incorporated Italian and French stylistic elements into his compositions, Purcell developed a properly English form of Baroque music. A complete musician, he eclipses by the quality and variety of his work all that his contemporaries have been able to write in the genres he addressed: opera, stage music, secular and religious cantatas, music for keyboard or chamber music.

Paul Gerhardt (1607-1676) - Die großen Chräle und Geistlichen Lieder
Otto Sander / Torsten Laux / Thomanerchor Leipzig / Christoph Biller
EAC+LOG+CUE | FLAC: 252 MB | Full Artwork | 5% Recovery Info
Label/Cat#: Rondeau # ROP4023 | Country/Year: Germayn 2006
Genre: Classical | Style: Baroque, Sacred

Gerhardt is considered Germany's greatest hymn writer. Many of his best-known hymns were originally published in various church hymnbooks, as for example in that for Brandenburg, which appeared in 1658; others first saw the light in Johann Crüger's Geistliche Kirchenmelodien (1649) and Praxis pietatis melica (1656)…

These guys later reaped much bigger fame under the name Revocation (six full-lengths released so far), but this recording here seems to deliver the goods in a slightly more convincing manner. Not that the Revocation repertoire is not worthy, on the contrary; the band have managed to rise to the very upper echelons of the technical/progressive thrash/death circuit in the past few years… It’s just that this opus shows a more original and a tad more creative stream of thought…

This Britten recital combines two of the composer’s major song cycles, Winter Words, from 1953, and Who are these Children? (1969). In them he explored themes of loneliness, transcience and war – difficult and harrowing material which would test any composer, but Britten is equal to the challenge. His music works its magic by bringing out poignant emotions and subtle insights, sometimes even more vividly than the texts on their own. The music’s emotional depth is grounded in compelling, quasi-naturalistic sound images, such as the whistling, rattling train in the setting of Thomas Hardy’s Midnight on the Great Western. Providing a lighter note between these gripping works are four settings of poems by Robert Burns, containing some of Britten’s most deft and delicate music. Composed on the request of Queen Elizabeth II in 1975, they originally formed part of a set of six songs for high voice and harp, and were later arranged for piano by Britten’s assistant Colin Matthews.