Customer Reviews

Schütz: Psalmen Davids

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Heinrich Schütz, Germany's greatest composer before Bach, was incredibly fortunate: his employers, two different German princes, paid for extended study trips to Venice for the young composer. Venice was one of the great musical centers of the seventeenth century, and Schütz used his time very wisely by studying with two of the greatest Italian composers of the time: first with Giovanni Gabrieli, then with Claudio Monteverdi. The new recording "Heinrich Schütz: Psalmen Davids" reveals the fruits of his first tour of study in Venice, with Gabrieli. It is a collection of the psalm settings in German that Schütz made while in Venice and shortly afterwards. These pieces are modelled on the opulent, even extravagent Venetian style that Gabrieli designed for the church of San Marco, but with unmistakeable signs of the unique gifts of the talented young German composer. This recording is simply spectacular. The vocal and instrumental forces of Cantus Cölln and Concerto Palatino, under the expert dirction of Konrad Junghänel, are perfectly balanced, and all performers are highly virtuosic. The diction is impeccable, the singing and playing sensitive both to performance practices of the time, and to the extraordinary expressiveness of the composer's musical style. The recording qualities are exemplary. This is a "must own" recording for anyone who loves Baroque music of the seventeenth century!

When the young Heinrich Schuetz returned from Venice to Kassel in 1613, he'd probably already begun some of the psalm settings that he would eventually include in his first, massive publication in 1619, in which he proclaimed his obligation to his teacher Gabrieli and to the "Italian" manner at large. Schuetz is widely credited for bringing the Italian manner, the declamatory vocal style of Monteverdi as much as the grand polychoral style of Gabrieli, to "Germany", and you will hear his total mastery of Italian musical ideas in every setting of these Psalms. But if you listen well, you will also hear the next century of German music - Tunder, Biber, Pachelbel, Bach - being born like Minerva almost full-grown from the head of Heinrich.

There was no "Germany" in 1619, yet a case can be made that Heinrich Schuetz was the first great German composer. Don't forget that during the late Renaissance the musical world north of the Brenner Pass was chiefly the Hapsburg Empire, a cosmopolitan world in which the dominant musical language was the international style founded by the great Franco-Flemish composers, most of whom had worked in Italy. Oodles of German musicians, from the Stadtpfeifer guilds, had traveled to Italian cities for better-paying gigs, most never to return north. The favored composers of the Hapsburgs, even those with Germanized names, were often Italian in origin or training. North of Hapsburgia were the chiefly Protestant provinces, where local pastors dabbled, sometimes very well, in music for their own communities, but even their work is largely derivative of the Franco-Flemish tradition. Then, in this magnificent collection of Psalms, Schuetz virtually invented the declamatory potential of the German language: lobet den Herrn! praise the Lord, and if you can't fore-hear Bach in that, you need to dewax your ears. The powerful resonant bass instruments, the trombones and early bassoons, that are so much a part of later German music are already present in Schuetz; the instruments were not new, but the stylistic use of them certainly was. Schuetz owed a great deal to Gabrieli but no experienced listener would ever mistake a Schuetz composition for the work of an Italian.

The city and court of Dresden, where Schuetz was working when he published Psalmen Davids, was the home of some of the best performing musicians in all Europe at the time, and the forces Schuetz could expect to employ in a concert were both capable and ample. This CD performance by Cantus Coelln and Concerto Palatino involves nine singers and twenty seven instrumentalists, and as another reviewer declares, Schuetz probably intended live performance by larger forces. In our age of electronics, however, larger forces would NOT be more effective, however authentic; older recordings of the Psalmen Davids demonstrate what happens when too many people sing into the microphone. Rumble and whirr, all white noise, nothing human-sounding in a choir of 40! To my ear, director Konard Junghanel has achieved a near perfect balance of power and clarity, sonority and transparency. Every soloist has a rich and moving timbre as well as impeccable technique. Every instrument sounds like itself, as well as being fingered and tooted virtuosically. Alas, Schuetz was almost never able to employ such vast and skillful musical resources in his later career, most of which took place during the desolation of the Thirty Years War. Thus, although his Symphoniae Sacrae and his various Passions are of unsurpassed musical brilliance, these Psalmen remain his most "magnificent" music. All through the 20th Century, musicologists proclaimed the importance of Heinrich Schuetz for the subsequent history of music, but very few performances were at all persuasive. It has taken us time to recreate the practices and skills to bring Schuetz to life, but this performance has convinced me: no greater music has ever been written.

This is an exceptionally fine recording, as one would expect from these groups, not at all lacking in splendor despite the relatively small peforming group. The present review is intended merely to point out that one earlier reviewer, critical of the size of the forces employed, does not seem to have read the entire preface to the Psalmen Davids, in which Schütz calls only the Cori Favoriti (the group of soloists) essential. The larger group of optional, less skilled, singers (the Capelle) can be nice, but is not required, as the Cori Favoriti has all of the essential parts. Hence this recording would seem to be very much within the boundaries of performance practice established by Schütz himself. There is an excellent discussion of the varieties of performance practice relevant to Schütz' Psalmen Davids in the complete Schutz edition (available in any good music library), edited by Wilhelm Ehmann, should the original preface be hard to come by.

Concerto Palatino and Cantus Koln are both usually excellent but this recording is disappointing for several reasons.
1. Schütz in his introduction to this work clearly states that he envisaged a large body of singers performing this music. OVPP is completely out of place here, no question about it.
2. There are not enough singers to cover all the vocal parts. This is amazing! Even if one were to adopt the OVPP orthodoxy, this recording simply does not have enough singers to cover all the vocal parts of the larger motets. (up to twelve and more vocal parts appear - one motet calls for three vocal choirs SATB/SATB/SATB and another features three solo voices and two vocal choirs with the option of two more vocal choirs - 6 choirs in all!)
3. Concerto Palatino sound like they are 'holding back', perhaps this is because they are working with so few singers? Anyway, the result is a curiously polite and unemotional performance. Dull, in fact. His Majestys Sagbutts & Cornetts and the Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge on their CONIFER CD of the Schütz Psalmen Davids play and sing with power, passion and a bit of strength - 'fire in their bellies', in fact.

This should have been the Psalmen Davids of the decade and I felt tremendously let down. This recording is technically perfect, well performed, in tune, colourful but dull and uninvolved.

I don't think that Heinrich Schütz envisaged a performance of this music that sounded so small and staid. The performers on this recording would have done well to actually read Herr Schütz' forward to these works!

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