Simone Eckert

Lübeck Virtuosos: Music of Dietrich Buxtehude and His Colleagues - Hamburger Ratsmusik
Buxtehude - G. Schütz - Grecke - Baudinger - Radeck
Classical, Baroque | 1 CD | EAC | FLAC, CUE, LOG | Scans | 357 MB | RS
Recorded: 3-5/1 2005, Schloß Salzau, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany
Released: 2005 | Label: Thorofon CTH 2474 | TT: 70:59
Hamburger Ratsmusik, Simone Eckert - viola da gamba

Echo Classic Award 2006

The people of Lübeck had a decided preference for music for strings. Important violinists and viola da gamba players worked there even at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and their teaching abilities ensured a continuous supply of successors. Initially influenced by the English music for viols, there developed a string style in Lübeck which combined English polyphony with a new degree of virtuosity. Johann Heinrich Schmelzer's trio sonatas for violin, viola da gamba and basso continuo were in the possession of the Marienkirche, and they caused South-German and Italian ideas to be incorporated as well. The music for strings was additionally influenced by the North-German organists' preference for the stylus phantasticus; often several hundred bars in length, the North-German chorale fantasias feature fascinatingly colourful and often abrupt changes in technique, tone colour, improvisatory quality and virtuosity. (Simone Eckert, CD-booklet)

Johann Schop - Hamburger Ratsmusicus - Hamburger Ratsmusik
(Erster Theil newer Paduanen, Galliarden […] - 1633)
Classical, Baroque | 1 CD | EAC | FLAC, CUE, LOG | Scans | 307 MB | RS
Recorded: 3-5/1 2006, Schloss Salzau, Schleswig-Holstein | TT: 55:58
Released: 2006 | Label: Thorofon CTH 2464
Hamburger Ratsmusik - Simone Eckert

Johann Schop [c. 1590-1667] was director of town music in Hamburg for much of the period overshadowed by the Thirty Years War (1618-48). After the war, he worked in the city until 1665, and died two years later. He was a virtuoso violinist and it is no surprise that he seems to have been highly regarded by the other town musicians […] Despite this apparent fame in his own time, Schop's music remains almost unknown. […]

[…] the individual lines as played here are admirably clear. The recorded balance between the parts is also excellent. The players perform the music very well indeed, and with a great deal of sensivity […] the commitment and musicianship that Hamburger Ratsmusik bring to their performances […] you cannot fail to be drawn to this music. (Michael Robertson, Early Music, Feb. 2007)

The name Hitchcock not only stands for the most famous of all British film directors, but for an important family of English instrument makers from England as well. Only a few of these sonorous and extravagant keyboard instruments have survived. The multi-stringed spinet No. 1379 from the Telemann Museum in Hamburg, with its black keys elaborately set in white ivory, can now be heard for the first time in a recording. The Hitchcock Trio invites you to a typical middle-class salon concert as was customary throughout Europe at the end of the 18th century.