Schütz

The first part of the Heinrich Schütz Complete Recording with the Dresdner Kammerchor under Hans-Christoph Rademann has set new artistic and editorial standards. Now the second of three box sets is being released. It encompasses Volumes 9 to 14 of the Complete Recording, including the St John Passion. This work, representative of the high standard of the whole series, was awarded the German Record Critics’ Award in 2016. Once again, top performers such as Hille Perl, Lee Santana, Dorothee Mields, Harry van der Kamp, and many others join the ensemble.

"Schützens Musik ist von einer so hervorragenden Qualität. Klare Gedanken, eine dem Sprachrhythmus ideal angepasste Rhythmik, ausdrucksvolle und klare Harmonik, eine gestische und klangrednerische Melodik und die eindringliche Durcharbeitung. Durchführung eines Textes, das sind nur einige der Positiva die mir spontan einfallen." Eine solche Hymne ist eher selten. Die Musik des Heinrich Schütz ist nicht vergessen, aber doch eigentlich eine für ein kleineres Publikum.

Heinrich Schütz's Christmas Story, besides being a historical milestone, has always been one of 17th-century music's crowd-pleasers–the former because it's the ancestor of Christmas oratorios by Bach, Charpentier, and even Berlioz; the latter because it presents engaging depictions of the characters in the Nativity story with a cornucopia of colorful instruments (piping recorders for the shepherds, a galumphing bassoon (representing the gait of the camels?) for the three wise men, regally blaring cornets for King Herod, and pompous trombones for his priests).

The Heinrich Schütz Complete Recording with the Dresdner Kammerchor under Hans-Christoph Rademann has set new artistic and editorial standards. Now the third of three box sets is being released. It encompasses Volumes 15 to 20 of the Complete Recording. A worthy conclusion to this award-winning series.

Paul Goodwin’s A Christmas Collection (his debut disc with the Academy of Ancient Music) offers an anthology of Schütz’s shorter dialogues and motets by way of an alternative to the composer’s own Christmas Oratorio. Anyone who has ever endured that drily austere work will be pleasantly surprised by the rich textures and vocal expressivity of much of the music here, and by the dramatic wit, say, of the little Annunciation scene, ‘Sei gegrüsset Maria’, for male alto Angel and soprano Mary, in which the mother-to-be can’t help interrupting her heavenly visitor, first in sheer amazement, then in her eagerness to confirm her unblemished virgin state.

By 1648, Heinrich Schuetz was both a survivor and a relic of his own past glory. The 63-year-old devout Lutheran had survived the religious slaughter of the Thirty Years War, which had killed more than half of the musicians of his German world. Surely the most influential composer of German history, he had also outlasted his own impact on the next generation of German composers, patrons, and audiences, who unjustly regarded his music as outdated. Who knows how he felt about his growing isolation, but it's interesting that he chose to compose one of his grandest and greatest accomplishments - the Geistliche Chormusik 1648, op. 11 - in the antiquated contrapuntal style of Renaissance vocal polyphony, the prima prattica, rather than the operatic Italianate seconda prattica he himself had introduced to German music.

The 2nd book of these Symphoniae, written in the dark years of the devastating 30 Years War and published in 1647, stands among his central body of works and holds many affecting and beautiful moments. The British recording being reviewed here presents the 2nd book in its order of publication, which is not structured as a coherent work end-to-end work but rather is organized by range and number of soloists, indicating that each of the symphoniae is a single piece standing on its own. Book II starts with the symphoniae for solo voice, works its way down the vocal range from soprano to bass, then proceeds on to the duets and trios and concluding with a few more ambitious works for a full set of vocal soloists.

…This is the best you will ever hear of the "Spiritual Choir-Music of Heinrich Schuetz (1585-1672). This one-disk performance is a selection of ten of the 49 motets in Schuetz's 1648 opus, interspersed with six quite distinct selections from the Kleine Geistliche Konzerte of 1636. The two sources are radically different; the earlier works are in the operatic 'secunda prattica' style of Monteverdi, sung by soloists over decorated basso continuo; the later works are superbly old-fashioned choral polyphony of the 'prima prattica' of composers dead before Schuetz was born. As a concert listening experience, the combination is highly effective, offering a variety and sprightliness that a through-reading of the complete Geistliche Chormusic can't provide.

With the Thirty Years’ War raging around them, Lutherans considered death to be the true fulfillment of their earthly life. Prince Heinrich von Reuss organised all the details of his funeral in advance, from the music that would be sung - to be composed and then performed by Heinrich Schütz during the funeral ceremony - to the coffin itself.

Here we have the type of disc that fills in the cracks, a discovery of several unrecorded byways of Schutz’s miscellaneous secular oeuvre. Of course, the seventeenth century being what it is, secular and sacred are deliberately dovetailed into a cultural pea soup: these works – so different from the thoroughly Mediterranean Op. 1 Madrigals – are embedded in the literary morality of the age (how typical and reverently set is the text of Haus und Guter: “house and goods are inherited from one’s parents, but a pious and virtuous wife is from the Lord. He who finds a wife, he finds something good and receives blessings from the Lord”) and are not entirely profane.