There are many beautiful things about these recordings of Bach's Magnificat and Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis Cantata, but beauty isn't really the ultimate point. With Sigiswald Kuijken leading four totally dedicated soloists plus La Petite Bande, truth is the point, the kind of incontrovertible, unrelenting, and unyielding truth that wakes you up in ...
Mendelssohn's sacred works are wholly sincere expressions of his deeply held Lutheran faith. If, after the passing of the nineteenth century in the Great War, the rhetorical oratorios Elijah and Paulus came to seem slightly over-done to younger audiences, that was the perhaps understandable reaction of clear-eyed youth to religiously sentimental ...
France's Naïve label continues to reissue recordings from the catalog of the small Opus 111 imprint, many of them small gems of Baroque and Classical music. Here is one from the fine Belgian historical-performance ensemble Il Fondamento. Johann Adolf Hasse is remembered mostly as an opera composer, but he also contributed copiously to the large ...
Although Dietrich Buxtehude was a forerunner of Bach in many genres, the cantata, oddly enough, was hardly among them. The cantatas collected on these two discs are works for one or two soloists with a small instrumental ensemble -- cantatas in the seventeenth century sense. There are no chorales involved, and some of the cantatas are divided up ...
Matthias Weckmann was a composer active in central and north Germany in the middle of the seventeenth century. The letter "n" at the end of his surname is usually doubled; the variant used here is acceptable, but the fluctuating usage in the booklet is not. In broad terms he was one of Bach's ancestors; his orientation and apprenticeship ...
Belgian conductor Philippe Herreweghe founded the vocal ensemble La Chapelle Royale in 1977 with a primary focus on music of the French Baroque, but the group has since branched into the repertoires of other countries and eras. In this release, the group sings Heinrich Schütz's three-movement Musikalische Exequien (Musical Funeral Rites) of 1635, ...
This double disc combines material from several earlier recordings, featuring different performers (albeit under the umbrella of the same Belgian ensembles, the Ricercar Consort and La Fenice) recorded as far back as 1981. That practice can be an irritant, but here the two discs complement one another beautifully -- even if the graphic designer of ...
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