Ich bin die Auferstehung: Buxtehude & His Copenhagen Connections

Album review

Danish harpsichordist and conductor Lars Ulrik Mortensen, who has been the musical director of the renowned baroque music ensemble Concerto Copenhagen since 1999, has studied Dietrich Buxtehude's relationship with Copenhagen for this new album. A legendary musician invariably associated with the formative years of the young Bach, Buxtehude spent his own youth in Denmark, first in Helsingborg, where he was probably born in 1637, and then in Helsingør, a radiant and luminous city where the young musician flourished in a most favourable environment. It was at the end of his classical studies that he perfected his skills in Copenhagen, where there was a flourishing musical and intellectual activity and where he received advice from the great musicians of the time. This album is dedicated to composers who gravitated to Buxtehude in the Danish capital, alternating vocal and instrumental pieces by Johann Balthasar Erben, Johann Valentin Meder, Matthias Weckmann, Kaspar Forster, Andreas Kirchhoff and Nicolaus Bruhns, who were the great masters of Northern Europe at the time. The dark and warm timbre of bass baritone Jakob Bloch Jespersen perfectly enhances the music that could be heard during services in the Baltic Sea region – at the time a real musical superpower. © François Hudry/Qobuz