Frieder Bernius

The Psalms of David were Schütz' first published collection 1619 after becoming the Choirmaster of the Duke of Saxony. Composed over a number of years, they blend Venetian inspired polychorality with the German of Luther's Bible translation. Throughout, particular attention is evident in the wordsetting, the meaning of the text as exemplified by the music was a driving force for Schütz throughout his creative life. Texts employed are mainly psalms or psalmselections, with a few other biblical excerpts.

The Psalms of David were Schütz' first published collection 1619 after becoming the Choirmaster of the Duke of Saxony. Composed over a number of years, they blend Venetian inspired polychorality with the German of Luther's Bible translation. Throughout, particular attention is evident in the wordsetting, the meaning of the text as exemplified by the music was a driving force for Schütz throughout his creative life. Texts employed are mainly psalms or psalmselections, with a few other biblical excerpts.

In this Carus release, Frieder Bernius leads soloists from Kammerchor Stuttgart in a selection of transcriptions by Clytus Gottwald and original compositions for chorus subdivided into multiple parts, in this case, up to 16 parts. The arrangements, here of songs originally for solo voice and piano, demonstrate Gottwald's mastery of this niche genre; he has also made remarkably effective choral transcriptions of chamber music and work for full orchestra. The arrangements, of songs by Ravel, Debussy, and Schumann, work beautifully as choral music, even as independent compositions, considered apart from their sources.

This disc is an amazing example of the hubris of a major classical label at the height of its imperial aspirations. Imagine the Columbia Records of the '60s releasing a record of Bruckner's Mass in E minor. Imagine the Sony of the new millennium releasing a disc by a provincial German chorus and an unknown conductor. Now be grateful that in 1991 that Sony, at the height of its aspirations, saw fit to record a splendid provincial German chorus and a brilliant unknown conductor in a magnificent recording of Bruckner's tremendous Mass in E minor. How else would there come to exist so wonderful a performance as this one by Frieder Bernius leading the Kammerchor Stuttgart and the Deutsche Blaserphilharmonie? The sound of the Stuttgart choir is pure, strong, and ardent.

Christian Cannabich himself - at first leader of the orchestra, then director of instrumental music at the court of Carl Theodor - was one of those who engaged with the new form of music drama. Cannabich, who mostly composed symphonies, chamber music and ballet suites and enjoyed the reputation among his contemporaries of being an excellent orchestra mentor, created the stage work Electra in 1781 with a setting of words by Mannheim intendant von Dalberg. From its beginnings in France, the melodrama established itself in the 1770s as an independent form of music drama, with particular success in the German-speaking territories.

Bohemian composer Jan Zelenka (1679-1745) spent the last 35 years of his life in Dresden, first as a double bass player and then as composer for the court, writing primarily for the church. This monumental Mass (“in honor of God the Father”) is one of several he composed in the last years of his life, and its structure–the main parts of the mass are subdivided into smaller sections–allows for a wide variety of scoring, including different configurations of soloists, solo arias, chorus alone, and chorus with solo singers.

First revived in the 1970s, Bohemian composer Jan Dismas Zelenka was once touted as the Arcimboldo of music owing to the bizarre twists and turns of his instrumental music, which accounts for only a tiny part of his output. While this was effective marketing and won him a certain avant-garde cachet, the vast majority of Zelenka's music is of the sacred vocal variety, and overall it is probably more useful to view him as a contemporary of Johann Sebastian Bach able to pursue professionally what the proudly Lutheran Bach could only do vicariously: compose Catholic service music.

A selection of works which shows the courage to try the unusual: Ligeti’s Lux aeterna and Boyd’s As I crossed a bridge of dreams share a flowing of harmonic fields into one another as if in slow motion. On the other hand, Ligeti’s use of the technique of dividing an apparently endless flow of sound, with its related intervallic structures, into comprehensible periods, shows similarities to Scarlattis method of employing motives whose intervallic structure are interrelated. For Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen Gottwald transferred Ligeti’s technique of vocal writing to his arrangement of the Mahler Lied.

A member of the Mannheim school, Ignaz Holzbauer (1711–1783) was a composer of symphonies, concertos, operas and chamber music who wrote in the style of the Sturm and Drang movement. In his penultimate opera "Tod der Dido" [The Death of Dido] (1779), Ignaz Holzbauer presented himself not only as a master of fine musical word interpretation, but also as an imaginative music dramatist. While the original Italian version underlined his position as one of the leading opera composers of the time, the German version which he wrote a year later additionally emphasizes his position as a pioneer of the German National Opera. Frieder Bernius therefore chose this version for a production performed at the Schwetzingen Festival in 1997, which is now being released here for the first time.

Between 1820 and 1847, Felix Mendelssohn composed a total of 38 songs for a cappella male voices. Many of these were written for his own use at home or in the company of friends. He also liked to personally gift or dedicate these songs to others. This recording by the male voices of the SWR Vokalensemble under conductor Frieder Bernius affords the opportunity to enjoy these wonderful compositions that are among the least explored parts of Mendelssohn’s vast oeuvre.