Sancta Florentina Holzinger

The music here was written for performance during Holy Week at the splendid Catholic court of Dresden in 1722. The example of Dresden stirred Johann Sebastian Bach to some of his most Italianate flights of opera-like music, and the composer of the Holy Week responsories heard here, the Bohemian-born Jan Dismas Zelenka (whom Bach himself admired), had an experimental, progressive spirit in much of his music. All the more of a surprise, then, to find that these pieces are written in an almost antique style. Each of the three Matins services is divided into three Nocturns, each of which is provided with three pairs of readings or lessons (given in chant) and three responsories, polyphonically set for a small choir (the two-singers-to-a-part forces heard here were apparently typical), with orchestral strings mostly doubling the vocal lines.

An important contribution to our understanding of the ‘gentle master musician.’ Stephen Rice brings perceptive musical insights to these accounts, and also sheds light on Févin’s idiom in the excellent CD booklet. His vocal ensemble may be slender but the singing is robust and buoyantly articulated. Boyish upper voices offset velvety tenors and basses, and the relatively close recording perspective produces a sound at once lucid and lustrous.

The "laude" of the Renaissance Italian city-states have survived in just two manuscripts; until recently they constituted one of the last major genres of Early Music to be reconstructed and performed. Essentially, they were the music commissioned by the guild-like confraternities (with members from the middle and lower economic classes of the cities) for performance by the members and by well-paid professional soloists, at festivals and in the side-chapels of the cathedrals where most lay people attended to their religious devotions. In short, the music of the people rather than the priests.