Musen

Artists Donna Brown, Gilles Cachemaille, Gächinger Kantorei Stuttgart, Bach-Collegium Stuttgart, Südfunk-Chor, Lioba Braun, Carsten Süß, Radio Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart Des Swr, Jürgen Uhde, Renate Werner, Kammerchor Stuttgart, Andreas Rothkopf, Hertha Klust, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Almut Eckels, Ingeborg Danz, Helmuth Rilling, Rupert Huber, Frieder Bernius

"Sound, ye drums! Ring out, ye trumpets!" In his Leipzig years, Bach liked to remind people that he was not only Kantor of St Thomas’s, but also the city’s director of music. It was in this capacity that he wrote these sumptuous secular cantatas, in honour respectively of the university professor Kortte (BWV 207, 1726) and of Queen Maria Josepha (BWV 214, 1733). Allegorical figures such as Industry, Fortune, Honour and Gratitude take it in turns to sing of the learning and the merits of the recipients, borrowing material from one of the Brandenburg Concertos or ‘quoting’ some of the finest music from the Christmas Oratorio, not yet composed…

Johann Sebastian Bach was a German composer and musician of the late Baroque period. He is known for his orchestral music such as the Brandenburg Concertos; instrumental compositions such as the Cello Suites; keyboard works such as the Goldberg Variations and The Well-Tempered Clavier; organ works such as the Schubler Chorales and the Toccata and Fugue in D minor; and vocal music such as the St Matthew Passion and the Mass in B minor. Since the 19th-century Bach revival he has been generally regarded as one of the greatest composers in the history of Western music.

The focus of our second collaborative venture with the Cappella Aquileia and Marcus Bosch for the Beethoven Year is formed by the complete recording of The Ruins of Athens, an incidental composition penned by Beethoven for the opening of the recently constructed theater in Pest (today: Budapest) in 1812 and an occasional work set to a text by the then popular writer August von Kotzebue. Those who perform this work today are faced with a dilemma. If they perform Beethovens music without the spoken text, then a work in which language and music are closely intertwined is reduced to an arbitrary sequence of musical numbers.

The mandora is a lute instrument that gradually disappeared with the advent of the guitar and has been completely forgotten since around 1820 - until today. The lutenist Jakub Mitrik has set himself the goal of reviving this instrument and its repertoire with this CD. The development of the mandora was a reaction to the baroque lute, which became increasingly complicated to play and had up to 14 courses of strings. It is tuned in a similar way to the later guitar and has six strings, the lower five of which are double-stringed. The mandora was particularly popular in monasteries, especially among the Benedictines. There, the mandora was valued as a solo and chamber music instrument due to its handiness and versatility. The archives of these monasteries also contain a very varied repertoire specially tailored to the mandora, which Jakub MitrIk and his Biber Consort present here for the first time. This is chamber music in a wide variety of formations, in which the mandora takes on the role of a fully-fledged partner that goes far beyond mere basso continuo accompaniment. With his selection, MitrIk presents a multi-coloured and sensitively performed CD programme that reflects the lightness of the late Baroque and early Classical periods and allows musical life in the monasteries outside the liturgy to shine in an unusual light.