Frieder Bernius

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.

The Magnificat and Gloria, written in 1822, are Mendelssohn’s first large-scale works which he composed for reasons other than study purposes. The influence of the intense cultivation of Bach by his teacher, Carl Friedrich Zelter, and the Berlin Sing-Akademie are clearly evident, as in the later chorale cantatas. The masterful 19-voice motet, Tu es Petrus, which Mendelssohn gave his sister as a birthday present, he had planned to publish as his very first sacred work. Frieder Bernius and the Kammerchor Stuttgart present a further addition to their model, prizewinning CD series of Mendelssohn’s complete sacred works.

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.

Frieder Bernius and his Stuttgart forces weigh in with one of the finer Mozart Requiems in a very crowded field–and to ensure this performance’s relative exclusivity, it’s one of only a handful of recordings that use the edition by Franz Beyer, an intelligent and persuasive 1971 effort to correct “obvious textural errors” and some decidedly un-Mozartian features in the orchestration attributable to Franz Süssmayr, Mozart’s pupil/assistant who completed the work after the master’s death. This live concert performance from 1999 offers well-set tempos (including a vigorous Kyrie fugue), infectious rhythmic energy from both chorus and orchestra, robust, precise, musically compelling choral singing, a first rate quartet of soloists–and, especially considering its concert-performance setting, impressively detailed and vibrant sonics. The CD also features informative notes by Beyer himself.

Until 1750, Europe was under the spell of the Italian opera seria for about 70 years. Then the audience began to develop a taste for more drama: no more succession of arias that were loosely welded together by an overly familiar plot, but a story in which people could live with the main characters. The French, who had stubbornly refused to go along in the European mania for Italian opera seria and had developed their own national opera, could look forward to an increasing influence of French opera. This can be clearly observed in the operas of Christoph Willibald von Gluck, who has gone down in history as the great opera reformer of the 18th century. However, there were even more composers who had implemented innovations and one of them was Niccolò Jommeli (1714-74).

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.