|
Reviewer: James
A. Altena
I first became addicted (there is really no
other term for it) to the music of Heinrich Schütz some 35 years ago. In the
subsequent course of acquiring various recordings of his almost 500
individual works, I auditioned the sets of the Cantiones Sacrae, Geistlische
Chormusik, and Kleine geistliche Konzerte that Manfred Cordes and his
Weber-Renaissance Bremen ensemble recorded in the later 1990s. At the time I
found them cold and unemotional and rejected them. In the past few years,
having encountered several other recordings by those forces that I found
commendable, I reassessed my previous opinion, obtained those sets, and
found them quite enjoyable after all. With these artists returning to Schütz
for the first time in a decade, I therefore looked forward to receiving this
set with eager anticipation ... only to be severely disappointed. While
highly polished from a technical standpoint, these performances are as stiff,
unemotional, and detached as I once remembered their predecessors to be, and
some of the voices are whitish and unattractive in timbre. I’ve played these
two discs through multiple times to make sure I wasn’t just in an “off” mood,
and I have the same reaction every time, especially when I compare this set
to its primary competitors: the Concerto Palatino on Accent (1991), Matteo
Messori and the Cappella Augustana on Brilliant Classics (2003), and Roland
Wilson and the Musica Fiata on Deutsche Harmonia Mundi (2010). (I do not
share J. F. Weber’s enthusiasm for the older 1984 Berlin Classics recording
led by Hans Grüß, reviewed back in 10:2; I find the performance style heavy
and antiquated and much of the solo singing substandard.) Of these, I would
perhaps rank Messori slightly behind the other two, but all three are much
superior to this curiously dispassionate version, which is regretfully not
recommended. CPO as usual provides clear, crisp recorded sound, detailed
notes, and complete texts.
Fermer la fenêtre/Close window
|
