Symphoniae Sacrae

Albumbeschreibung

This is a specialist recording of works that are still in need of general-listener coverage. It harks back in a way to a time, four decades ago or so, when most recordings of music before Bach were made by ensembles associated with academic institutions. The liner notes seethe with scholarly score-settling, and the average listener wanting to learn basic facts about the music heard on the disc might as well be reading ancient Greek. An editor could have slashed it by at least half and made something useful out of it.
So, for the record, Schütz published his first collection of Symphoniae Sacrae in 1629, after making his second musical pilgrimage from central Germany to Venice. He named them after a collection of works by Giovanni Gabrieli, but the music shows the fruits of his efforts to familiarize himself with new Italian music -- most significantly that of Claudio Monteverdi, whom he met during his stay. These Latin-language motets are for one to three solo voices, plus small groups of instruments (with continuo) that might include not only strings but also some of the horns of the time. Several are powerful dramatizations of biblical scenes, and in Fili mi, Absalon the bass voice gets one of its first great moments in the spotlight. Schütz's second collection of Symphoniae Sacrae was compiled in 1647; it again features solos and small vocal groups, with simpler instrumental accompaniment. A third volume includes choral compositions. The present disc is a Super Audio CD excerpted from earlier Schütz recordings by the same performers.
Bologna musicologist Matteo Messori is a better ensemble leader and organist than annotator, and the performances by his Cappella Augustana are listenable. Under his direction, the music comes out sounding more like Monteverdi than Gabrieli -- expressive and vocally agile rather than sober and monumental. The vocal soloists, many of them Eastern European, don't have quite the power that this style demands, but they're crisp and intonationally on target. The chief attraction of this disc is its instrumental sound: chances to hear Schütz played on carefully researched authentic instruments of the time are rare. The natural trumpets, cornetts, violette, and fiffare heard here fill out the textures of these pieces in ways that will seem unusual to those who've heard the modern equivalents. Ultimately, one wonders why this magnificent corner of the early Baroque repertory has remained so little explored by ensembles that place music ahead of scholarly pecking order.

© TiVo

Details of original recording : 66:24 - DDD - Enregistré en juillet 2003 en l'église de S. Giacomo, Polcenigo (Pordenone) en Italie - Notes en anglais avec les textes chantés en langue originale (latin ou allemand) avec traduction anglaise