Corvus Corax Cantus Buranus II

With a combination of historical music and modern fantasy elements, the Berlin musicians have shaped our present understanding of medieval music. After countless fabled albums such as "Mille Anni Passi Sunt", "Sverker" or "Gimlie" they brought Vikings, gods and legends back to life. Now, one year before their 30th anniversary, their new and spectacular album "Skál" revives the mood of old times and makes people dance and jump around crazy (as we know from medieval music).

""En cette ville, on n’avait jamais entendu auparavant son égal en matière de composition et de pratique des instruments les plus variés…"" Nikolaus Bruhns, auquel on doit les plus belles cantates écrites avant Bach, n’a malheureusement pas eu le loisir d’exercer longtemps son art. Il est mort prématurément à l’âge de 32 ans.

Membra Jesu Nostri (The Limbs of our Lord Jesus) is the single largest and most compelling of the 110 or so sacred vocal works left us by Dutch-German master Dietrich Buxtehude. Buxtehude is better known for his organ music and is rightfully acknowledged as a formative influence on Johann Sebastian Bach. However, Buxtehude's vocal output is slightly larger than that for organ, and he was a key player in the refinement of the German sacred concerto into what we now call the sacred cantata, which he and his wife inherited from its creator and his predecessor, Franz Tunder, in the town of Lübeck. In the years following Buxtehude's death in 1707, German composers of all kinds were gainfully employed writing cantatas in the thousands, Georg Philipp Telemann produced nearly 2,000 of them on his own.

The 17th-century Austrian composer Heinrich Biber is remembered today for his extraordinary solo violin music–collections such as the Mystery Sonatas. He wrote a number of large-scale instrumental works and choral pieces as well, but their reputation is not as high. They include a lot of grand gestures for brass, but they tend to be harmonically static and often seem long-winded. So Konrad Junghänel and his superb musicians have really achieved something by making the works on this disc sound so appealing.