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Michael Haydn, like his brother, was a chorister at St Stephen's in Vienna. Shortly after leaving the choir-school, he was appointed Kapellmeister at Großwardein and later, in 1762, at Salzburg. The latter office he held for forty-three years, during which time he wrote over 360 compositions for the church and much instrumental music. He was an intimate friend of Mozart, who had a high opinion of his work, and the teacher of Carl Maria von Weber.
Michael Haydn's sacred choral works are generally regarded as being his most important, including the Missa Hispanica (which he exchanged for his diploma at Stockholm), a Mass in D minor, a Lauda Sion, and a set of graduals, forty-two of which are reprinted in Anton Diabelli's Ecciesiaslicon. He was also a prolific composer of secular music, including forty symphonies, a number of concerti and chamber music including a string quintet in C major which was once thought to have been by his brother Joseph.

"When the ci-hitty gets into a bu-hoys sy-hist-em, he loses his a-hankerin' for the cou-huntry." So intones W.C. Fields in his Yukon-based Victorian absurdist two-reeler The Fatal Glass of Beer (1933). However, if the city you lived in was Salzburg, Austria, the idea of "a-hankerin' for the cou-huntry" was a popular one, and Salzburg's court composer Johann Michael Haydn paid tribute to it through these two little "Abbey operettas" written not for a civic theater, but for the theater at the Benedictine University in Salzburg. Haydn's singspiel Die Hochzeit auf der Alm (The Wedding on the Alpine Pasture, 1763) was intended as a mere opener to Salzburg scribbler Florian Reichssiegel's ponderous five-act Latin tragedy Pietas conjugalis in Sigismundo et Maria; however, it was the singspiel that won the day.

You might see it in the stars or the root of a tree. It can be the flickering fluorescent light in the corner of a room or dew settling on a leaf in the early morning hours. It is overwhelming, yet barely there. Terminalia Amazonia, the new, subdued and momentous instalment of Zu, is the sound of a long, slow journey in pursuit of a moment. For the past four years the band’s members have regularly visited an undisclosed indigenous village on the Ucayali River close to the border between Peru and Brazil. They’ve immersed themselves in the local Shipibo-Conibo culture’s ancient knowledge, teachings and rituals, some of which stretch back millennia.

Selig - Von Ewigkeit zu Ewigkeit
EAC+LOG+CUE | FLAC: 450 MB | Full Artwork | 5% Recovery Info | Genre: Rock
Label/Cat#: Vertigo Berlin # 0602527509303 | Country/Year: Germany 2010

File this one under "they don't make 'em like that anymore." Which is, of course, an exaggeration, but does say something about Selig and their stubbornly '90s brand of unadorned grown-up rock. They still start off with grunge 19 years after Nevermind – which alone is impressive enough – but add a healthy blues-rock influence in the Black Crowes vein to channel maturity, not angst. (…) as well as a fiendishly enjoyable way of dispelling the notion that the Germans ain't got no groove.

This is an important document, not least because what is actually captured on these discs is the first performance of this work since 1772. The score is presently housed in the archive of the Berlin Sing-Akademie after its discovery in the Ukraine. C.P.E.’s version of the Christ story is a dynamic one, with plenty of drama and much interaction between the various soloists and the chorus - a chorus that represents the Jews as well as performing the chorales.