German Baroque Cantatas

The young Czech soprano Hana Bla íkóva is currently one of the most exciting voices in the baroque scene today. After receiving her final diploma at the Conservatory of her native city Prague in 2002, the singer very rapidly gained an excellent reputation as a baroque interpreter. Conductors such as Philippe Herreweghe, Masaaki Suzuki and Vaclav Luks frequently invite her for CD recordings, concerts and tours. She regularly appears at renowned festivals including Prague Spring, Festival Oude Muziek Utrecht, Resonances in Vienna and the Early Music Days in Regensburg.

This is a gem of a CD. It's a well-chosen, well-performed and well-presented anthology of mid-Baroque German sacred cantatas. Bass Peter Kooij and the seven-person L'Armonia Sonora are directed by gambist Mieneke Van der Velden. They have a close and warm affinity not only with one another, but also for the music; it's music as varied as it's beautiful. Its rich, sustained sonorities will stay with you long after you have finished the uplifting experience of listening to the CD. Released on the enterprising Ramée label De profundis clamavi comprises seven sumptuous examples of the music written in the north German Länder in the period after the Thirty Years War. It's music which not so much 'reflects' that profound conflict, as is 'affected' by it – weighed down with detached regret and unselfconscious resignation.

This recording, whose title is here embodied in an instrumental version by Georg Böhm of the renowned chorale Vater unser, brings together sacred works and Lutheran cantatas for the alto voice. The concertante role allotted to the instruments is particularly important in these works and contributes to their deeply expressive character; these works were heavily influenced by Italian styles of the period. All of the instrumental works are closely linked to sacred music, the majority of them being constructed around chorale melodies.

Though only one cantata gets to bear the nickname, Bach actually wrote many works that could be described as wedding cantatas. Some of them are lost, others are of debatable authorship, but of those that remain, four are collected on this 2008 disc. The performances by Ton Koopman leading the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra & Choir are taken from their set of the complete extant cantatas with the four works here recorded in 1994, 1996, and 2002. Though Koopman has shown himself to be a master Bach conductor, one sometimes got the sense in listening to his sacred cantatas that the composer's Lutheran ethos sat less well with his naturally ebullient personality than did the far more cheerful secular cantatas.

German Baroque composer Johann Friedrich Fasch organized a music exchange service between Dresden, Darmstadt, Hamburg, and other cities, which allowed him to know exactly what was new and upcoming. His style, then, often seems to be rooted in his own period, while looking forward to the classical era. He enjoyed writing for the chalumeau, an early French two-keyed clarinet, and this mellow yet agile instrument is featured on three of the pieces here, most notably the concerto in B-flat. Gili Rinot proves a worthy player of this curious instrument, playing with virtuoso flair, yet able to float long, lyrical lines so lovely and sweetly that they seem to hang in the air.

The voice of countertenor Franz Vitzthum resounds with lightness and clarity: its almost ‘celestial’ quality appears completely free of all ballast. How appropriate therefore is this programme for Christophorus, in which the yearning for eternal life, when the shackles of mortal existence have been thrown off, was a central theme of the German Baroque period.

The voice of countertenor Franz Vitzthum resounds with lightness and clarity: its almost ‘celestial’ quality appears completely free of all ballast. How appropriate therefore is this programme for Christophorus, in which the yearning for eternal life, when the shackles of mortal existence have been thrown off, was a central theme of the German Baroque period.