Szobel Hermann Szobel

For every musician connected with church music, Bach’s Christmas Oratorio is a highlight of the liturgical year, and it was at a performance of this very work that we first met. Playing together in the continuo unit requires a seventh sense for one’s fellow musicians and a heightened awareness of the musical breath of the soloists. In short, it requires non-verbal communication. The feeling of being able to rely on each other, and the perfect rapport in our musical understanding, kindled our desire to record a completely novel kind of music album.

Hasse was 52 when he composed the Mass in D minor recorded here, but in every way – in form, affect, and aesthetics – Hasse belongs more to the generation of the much younger Haydn than to that of Bach. His Mass in D minor is thoroughly a work of the Enlightenment: symmetrical, lucidly rational, celebratory rather than penitent, 'public' rather than personal, a concert of elegant music rather than an outpouring of spiritual energy. It's not as great a work as Bach's – let us not be unclear about that – but it's a wonderful composition in its own way. If you have heard and appreciated the Haydn and Mozart masses, you'll find this mass quite as excellent as those. In fact, Hasse's mass sounds very much like Haydn at his best, in the masses that Haydn wrote 40-some years later for Esterhazy occasions.

Beethoven’s gifted pupil Ferdinand Ries was never entirely forgotten, but it is only in recent years that CPO and Hermann Max have dedicated themselves with great success to the rediscovery of this spirited late classicist and romanticist. Ries’ oratorio Der Sieg des Glaubens (The Triumph of Faith), is heard here for the first time since 1829 where is was written in response to a commission for the Lower Rhine Music Festival in Aachen. The work develops a philosophical discourse dealing with the power of faith and the grace of God.

Hermann Max's recording of J. S. Bach: Matthaus Passion with the Rheinische Kantorei and Das Kleine Konzert embodies current orthodoxy in most respects: two choirs of 16 voices each are partnered by two orchestras of comparable size, with period instruments sounding at low (Baroque) pitch; tempos are mostly quite sprightly and textures light; ornamentation is sparing and discreet, but cadential appoggiaturas in the recitatives are mostly in place (though the latest fashion seems to be increasingly to omit them). Christoph Pregardien and Klaus Mertens are ideally cast as the Evangelist and Jesus: precise in diction, judicious in expression. The other soloists are more variable.

In an age of artistic conformity, Jan Dismas Zelenka (1679-1745) had a refreshingly individual voice. In his own time he was described as 'a reserved, bigoted Catholic, but also a respectable, quiet, unassuming man, deserving of the greatest respect'. His music earned Bach's respect for its serious contrapuntal procedures; today's listeners, though, are more immediately charmed by Zelenka's quirky turns of phrase and flashes of original genius. There are plenty of these in the Passion oratorio Gesù al Calvario (1735), one of the composer's three late oratorios.

The operetta Die Fledermaus is Johann Strauss' most brilliant and best-known stage work. It's a glittering comedy packed with Viennese music that has become a firm favourite in opera houses all over the world. A top international cast really have a ball in this highly-acclaimed 1984 New Year's Eve performance from the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in which Placido Domingo makes a very stylish British conducting debut. Kiri Te Kanawa stars with her celebrated performance as Rosalinde, and the charismatic Austrian baritone Hermann Prey is Eisenstein, one of his trademark roles. The cast also includes Benjamin Luxon as Dr Falke and Hildegarde Heichele as Adele.

'I am an EU singer', Hermann Prey always said about himself. However, by that he did not mean so much his citizenship of a European Union country as the fact that he felt at home in the fields of 'E' and 'U', i.e. in 'serious' and entertainment music alike. For Prey, this distinction never existed, but only the issue of the quality of music, and he found this not only in opera and Lied, but also in operetta, the musical and the well-made hit. For forty-six years Prey convinced audiences; this five-disc collection reveals his fascinatingly wide-ranging repertoire and interpretative skill.

Leopold Anton Kozeluch, often inaccurately and unjustly portrayed as a scheming opponent of Mozart and Haydn, was actually an extraordinarily popular and successful composer during his own lifetime. Already in 1781 Kozeluch had such an outstanding reputation that the Salzburg archbishop offered him the court organist's post left vacant by Mozart. The Bohemian composer's some 250 works include symphonies, piano music, operas, cantatas, string quartets, and a number of oratorios. Moses in Egypt, an oratorio based on the Book of Exodus from the Old Testament, was premiered in the old Burgtheater in 1787.

Last year’s Magdeburg Festival Days were marked by an extraordinary event: the revival of Telemann’s last known extant passion composition, the St. Luke Passion of 1748, by the Rheinische Kantorei and the Kleines Konzert under Hermann Max. In the mid-nineteenth century the autograph made its way to Berlin, where it today is preserved as the only source for this composition. The historical edition was prepared especially for the modern repeat performance in Magdeburg. Every four years Telemann returned to the same passion narrative, always employing the language of music to occupy himself in new ways with the gospel message of each of the four evangelists.

Graun was in his mid-twenties when he composed this Grand Passion . It is a surprisingly mature work, full of subtle gems. When first listening to this two-CD album, I wrote: “The music is very pleasant. Although it is quite tuneful, little of it is memorable and at two hours tends to wear out its welcome. There is almost a monotonous similarity of one number to the next. It needs something rousing like the ‘Hallelujah’ chorus.” Repeated hearings of this album have increased my appreciation considerably. Even Handel liked this Passion , and quoted some of its music in his own works.