Frieder Bernius

For the 500th anniversary of the Reformation a collection of all 35 hymns by Luther is being released on a double CD for the first time. The Lutheran hymns in choral settings and chorale cantatas from the 16th century to the present day (including works by Praetorius, Scheidt, Bach, Mendelssohn, Jennefelt, and Schwemmer) are performed by the Kammerchor Stuttgart under the direction of Frieder Bernius and the Athesinus Consort Berlin conducted by Klaus-Martin Bresgott. The choral settings are complemented by chorale arrangements for organ. Extensive liner notes with meditations on selected hymns by Margot Käßmann, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Markus Meckel, Judith Zander, Uwe Kolbe, and others complete the recordings.

The recordings are typical DHM with superb clarity and dynamic range. The mastering to digital is excellent, and the booklet accompanying the series, while brief, is informative. The only unifying these here is baroque Italian composers, but it's extremely easy to fill a collection ten times this size with material from that category. What we end up with in these ten discs is a lovely mix of known and unknown, each pleasant to listen to and discover, and there's no listener fatigue at all working through these discs.

VIVARTE is the legendary Sony Classical period music label known for producing outstanding recordings on period instruments. The recordings by legendary producer Wolf Erichson are made with the best recording technologies available and by one of the best production teams in the world (Tritonus Music Production, Stuttgart). The collection contains a perfect overview of VIVARTE's legendary catalogue ranging from Vivaldi to Brahms including recordings with specialists in historically informed performance practice such as Anner Bylsma, Gustav Leonhardt, Tafelmusik, Huelgas Ensemble, L'Archibudelli among others. Many of the recordings received critical acclaim all over the world and won prestigious awards. This box set includes CDs presented in paper sleeves with the original artwork, a 250 page booklet with track listings and the original liner notes for each recording.

Since it's founding in Freiburg in 1958, Deutsche Harmonia Mundi has been one of the most important and ambitious labels for period performances. Over decades, globally-acclaimed recordings were created with outstanding musicians. The limited edition "Deutsche Harmonia Mundi: 100 Great Recordings" contains 100 outstanding DHM recordings with some of the most important and best artists in their field: Nuria Rial, Dorothee Mields, Al Ayre Espanol, Hille Perl, Concentus Musicus Wien, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, the Freiburger Barockorchester, Skip Sempé, Capriccio Stravagante, La Petite Bande, Gustav Leonhardt, Andrew Lawrence-King, Frieder Bernius, the Balthasar-Neumann-Chor, Thomas Hengelbrock and many others.

This is an excellent and varied selection of composers from the very well known like Palestrina, Monteverdi, Bach and Vivaldi, through the less famous but familiar like Frescobaldi, Sainte-Colombe and Zelenka, to the downright obscure. It is all delightful: the musicians are uniformly excellent, and include such great names as Gustav Leonhardt, Cantus Colln, Christopher Hogwood and so on. They give fine performances both of the familiar works and of the less familiar ones. Obviously there will be discs you like more than others and you may already have favourite versions of some works, but these discs are never less than very good and are often outstanding.