Membra Jesu Nostri

Buxtehude - Membra Jesu Nostri - Ricercar Consort, Philippe Pierlot (2019) {Mirare MIR444}
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© 2019 Mirare | MIR444
Classical / Baroque / Sacred / Cantata

In 1680, Dietrich Buxtehude sent his friend Gustav Düben the score of Membra Jesu nostri. In this perfectly balanced work, he addresses the senses directly, immersing us in the sufferings of Christ: we feel the hammer blows, the heart that stops beating… Through the genius of his music Buxtehude succeeds in moving us, enlightening us and instructing us in the profound meaning of the text.

Following their ICMA award-nominated first album on Resonus (A Courtly Garland for Baroque Trumpet), period ensemble Orpheus Britannicus, with director Andrew Arthur, joins with The Chapel Choir of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and viol consort Newe Vialles for an impelling new recording of Buxtehude’s seminal and ground-breaking cycle of cantatas Membra Jesu nostri, BuxWV 75. With a distinguished lineup of soloists complementing this magnum opus, Arthur and his musicians give a gripping account of one of the most significant of early-Baroque oratorios.

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.

Jacobs has found the means of marrying intense religious fervour with highly ”personalised” expression. (…) The instrumental ensemble provides a commentary of indescribable poetry. (…) The coupling is also exceptionally interesting, with the jubilation of Heut triumphieret Gottes Sohn forming a superb contrast with the meditations of Membra Jesu nostri and offering an apotheosis in its concluding Alleluia.

Since its formation in 2008, the Ensemble Correspondances has devoted itself chiefly to French sacred music of the seventeenth century. Brought together by Sébastien Daucé during their studies at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique (CNSM) de Lyon, the musicians of Correspondances pursue this work (focusing notably on Marc-Antoine Charpentier) with infectious enthusiasm today.

Northward ho! Sébastien Daucé and his musicians here make a geographical detour, forsaking England and France in order to explore Lutheran Europe before J. S. Bach. One is struck by the expressive vigour of these finely detailed works, which have retained all their power to fascinate today’s listeners. Merging old and new, the austerely beautiful language of Buxtehude, Schütz and the much more rarely heard Dijkman unexpectedly echoes the music of their contemporary Marc-Antoine Charpentier.