His Passion

Times of change are often interesting. That is certainly the case with episodes in music history in which aesthetic ideas were changing. One such period was the time around 1600. In Italy the stile concertato was born and gradually broke the dominance of the old polyphonic style. This soon spread around Europe and also reached Germany. Some composers, like Heinrich Schütz, embraced it without ever abandoning counterpoint. Others offered strong resistance and largely held to the dominant church music tradition. One of them was Christoph Demantius.

Friedemann - Passion And Pride (1999) {Biber 76671 Digital Download}
FLAC (tracks) - 16bit/44kHz - Official Digital Download (qobuz.com) -> 279 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 111 Mb | Cover | 5% repair rar
© 1999 Biber Records / in-akustik | Biber 76671
Jazz / Contemporary Instrumental Music / Nu-Jazz / Guitar

Back in the 1970‘s Friedemann Witecka, who was born in Freiburg in south-western Germany, slung his guitar over his shoulder and set off for London, England in search of creative inspiration. The 1980‘s took him to Stuttgart where he made a name for himself as head of the Biber label and as a talent scout and producer, and above all with his own music: harmony-intensive and multicoloured instrumental works between the poles of folk, chamber music and jazz. With his impeccably beautiful sound sketches Friedemann swam persistently against the (pop) main stream and in doing so created original and high-quality accents on the German scene.

Bach wrote his passion-oratorio during the first year of his assumption of duties in Leipzig. The city fathers were rather strict in their Lutheranism, and forbade anything that remotely smacked of the newly-found opera craze that was infecting the country at the time, and seeped into the passion music of such luminaries like Telemann. As a result Bach was constrained, if such a word can be used, to employing the gospel only as the source of his libretto. Because of this the St. John Passion has perhaps the greatest text of any passion ever written, and Bach was determined to make the piece worthy of the scriptures he was setting.