Customer Reviews

Heinrich Schütz: Cantiones Sacrae

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The first ten bars of "O bone, o dulcis, o benigne Jesu" - the opening track on this amazing 2-CD performance - will startle most listeners out of any complacency they have about Baroque music being predictable. To portray in harmonies the longing of "miserable man" for divine atonement, Heinrich Schuetz unleashes chord progressions and dissonances that out-shock Shostakovich and out-brazen Berio. Only the madrigals of Carl Gesualdo had ever previously employed such a harmonic fearlessness. If music is the language of the emotions, then Schuetz had an SAT 800 vocabulary, and he squandered all of it in these 40 Sacred Chansons for four solo voices SATB, with continuo added later on just four of them. Schuetz himself never again ventured into such harmonic neverlands, becoming a masterful conservative in his later compositions.

Forty four-part madrigals!?! Who could listen to 110 minutes of that without dropping off? Well, I did, for one. The kaleidoscope of tonalities, abrupt rhythmic changes, evocations of mood that last only seconds, like the facial music of a beautiful child of two and a half, all held my rapt attention through both disks, without even a coffee break.

The Weser-Renaissance ensemble, led by Manfred Cordes, has disappointed me on earlier choral CDs. Hence I was reluctant to buy this ten-year-old performance with its rather murky-looking cover art. But my reluctance was misplaced; this is not a choral performance. It's a one-on-a-part rendition by technically superb singers of the highest rank:
Bass Peter Kooij, tenor John Potter, soprano Mona Spaegele, and either tenor Rogers Covey-Crump or male alto Ralf Popken on various selections. The alto parts of these motet-madrigals have such extended ranges that it would be nearly impossible for the same singer to sing all of them, so Popken takes the pieces with the higher tessitura, and Covey-Crump the lower. Soprano Mona Spaegele achieves a miracle; she sings with the vibrato-free voce bianca of a gifted male soprano! That's a complimrnt in this case, since it enables her to blend seamlessly with the three male voices. I can't 'hear' the baton of Manfred Cordes anywhere in the music - another compliment, since this polyphony has to sound utterly free in rhythmic rhetoric - yet the ensemble is so close, so precise in articulations that I must believe either in telepathy or brilliant conducting.

The Cantiones Sacrae are unusual historically also - texts in Latin, composed by a devout Lutheran working for the most Protestant prince in Europe and dedicated to a mover-and-shaker in the Catholic Hapsburg court in Vienna. This was in 1625! in the very middle of the Thirty Years War.

Friends, I realize that I've waxed enthusiastic about several Schuetz performances in recent reviews, but this is a performance you've got to hear. There are several other CDs available of selections from the Cantiones Sacrae, but none of them approach this one in musicianship.

It is sad but more than a little bit humorous that the dogmas of the "Historically Informed", 1VPP, "Period Instrument" crowd are becoming so powerful that practitioners are led to find ridiculously torturous solutions to totally artificial, hideously complicated problems.

I suppose Cordes is to be congradulated on finding a solution that works, at least in the sense that the music comes through clearly, but then the same might be achieved by playing the pieces on an organ. The sound is not at all what Schütz intended.

The dogma in this case: One must use a counter-tenor (or "adult male alto" or "high tenor" or whatever).

The problem: No way the second voice in all these pieces fits a countertenor.

Cordes' solution: Alternate TWO different countertenors and also transpose some of the pieces.

In the liner notes Cordes tells us that everybody knows about this problem of alto-clef parts composed around 1600 being too low for some countertenors and too high for others. Cordes posits that voices were somehow different way back then (something in the air?), or maybe audiences found it acceptable for singers to change registers every three or four notes.

It is hilarious that NOBODY seems to have picked up Ockham's razor and considered the possibility that MAYBE these alto-clef parts were intended for real altos- boy altos that is. They fit the range perfectly, without transposition. A well trained boy alto actually has a larger range than a countertenor. In the 1600s they were far more common as a second voice in sacred motets than countertenors. Unfortunately, in 2010 they (well-trained boy altos, or boy anythings that can sing in tune) are extinct, though occasional rare sightings are claimed, most recently in Japan and eastern Europe.

OTOH countertenors are far more common in 2010 than they were in 1610 but, believe me, they do not sound ANYTHING LIKE boy altos. It's like replacing an alto flute with a tenor schwam. Needing a range a bit higher than a contralto, the living creature that sounds most similar to a boy alto is... a mezzo. An adult, female, mezzo-soprano. The most commonly found singing mechanism on the planet.

But Ockham's disciples have much razoring to do before any solution so obvious can be used. For one thing, in the current discussed pieces that would mean that the four voices would be "SATB"- anathema to the "Historically Informed" crowd.

For those and similar reasons I must sadly report that this recording, despite its basic wrong-headedness, is the best complete recording of the Cantiones available. The other complete version makes the same wrong assumptions. And even the Nevel-Currende choral one-disk excerpts are transposed down and done ATTB. Cordes' performance is very well thought out and well rehearsed, the performers are extremely professional and sympathetic to Schütz' music. Horizontal tension and intensity are maintained throughout- very impressive considering tempos are on the slow side. For my taste the Gabrieli-descended vertical weight and antiphonal nature of some sections might have been given more weight but that's another story of another bee in my Schütz bonnet that I'll reserve for another poor unsuspecting album.