Joannès

With the flood of recordings devoted to the freethinking Salzburg Baroque composer Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber, it is not surprising that his predecessor as Salzburg music director, Andreas Hofer, has been resurrected. There is nothing here to rival Biber's outlandish and fascinating programmatic ideas; Hofer's sacred music, as represented on this disc, falls much closer to the Venetian-derived German mainstream inherited from Schütz. That said, this is an ideal purchase for anyone who likes Schütz, Biber, or the south German Baroque in general. The album reproduces a hypothetical Vespers service of the area, featuring the music Hofer, as kapellmeister, might have drawn together for a festive event – mostly his own, but also including works by Biber, Giovanni Valentini, and Johann Baptist Dolar.

At the time of his death, in 1741, Joseph-Hector Fiocco's widow sold the manuscripts of the composer's works to Joannes Vanden Boom, Dean and Chapel Master of the Cathedral Saint Michel and Saint Gudule in Brussels, where the composer had held the post of zangmeester (choirmaster) until his untimely death. Among this collection is a complete set of nine Lamentations for Holy Week for the unusual instrumentation of solo voice, obbligato cello and basso continuo. Fiocco’s Lamentations are conceived in the most elevated Italian style of the early eighteenth century. They are masterful and can compete with the most beautiful such compositions, given their dramatic power and poignant emotion. In addition to the nine Lamentations known from the abovementioned manuscript, the present recording offers in world premiere two new settings and a differently instrumented version found in the archives of the Fonds St.-Jacob in Antwerp.