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Reviewer: Barry
Brenesal As this release was entitled Kriegsgeschichten, War Stories, I expected something along the lines of Johann Heinrich Schmelzer’s ballets presenting and exaggerating specific foreign, exotic musical styles, and Heinrich Biber’s Battalia à 10. It was a reasonable assumption. Stuttgart, in the southwest of modern Germany, is relatively close to Austria, although quite a distance from the old Hapsburg court seat at Vienna to the east. Some crossover of influence in the 17th century was bound to be felt, and show up in this music. And so it did, though not as expected. Georg Daniel Speer (1636–1707) was a minor composer, but a major personality in late 17th-century Stuttgart (which even later, in the mid-1700s, was only a respectable town, with a population of 17,000) and especially nearby, in smaller Göppingen, where he ultimately rose to the post of Kantor at the Lateinschule. But in his youth, according to Speer, he was a mercenary for hire, and took part in several wars in central Europe. Whether true or not—he writes this in a picaresque, semi-autobiographical novel, and we have no actual records of his whereabouts before 1665—he supposedly was an army drummer, then a bugler with the Hungarians against the invading Turks, and was among the forces of an important though unidentified lord who entered conquered Constantinople. Between his teaching, composing, and time spent writing on contemporary politics and practical and theoretical matters of music, Speer converted some of that novel, Ungarischer oder Dacanscher Simplicissimus, to music. Part of it is what we have, here: excerpted war stories in which the central figure, the main subject, is named Lompyn. He’s made into a simple-minded spectator, presumably to help bring out the humor in the “quaint” customs of other cultures and peoples he observes with wonder. It has to be noted, though, that Speer’s recollections of the enemy leaders acting like comic hall cowards in person and being pushed around as though by a party of bullying brats makes the whole thing’s veracity highly suspect, and the humor throughout is exaggeratingly broad. Speer sets these texts in a ballad-like fashion that is low on musical interest, high on enunciation. Further, Gunar Letzbor readily admits in his notes that as they rehearsed, and with his encouragement, tenor Markus Miesenberger moved away from the cantabile style of the original towards declamation that sometimes ignores the notes altogether. In other words, it’s even less interesting musically, now, than it was to begin with. In between the various so-called “ballets” and the intrada, which are actually the sections devoted to the war stories, Letzbor interpolates short instrumental pieces by Speer. Most are for brass, though the album ends with three for strings. These are very much in the style I expected out of the whole album, if without the air of depiction (Die Fechtsschule) or caricature (Polnische Sackpfeiffen) that was part of the reason behind the delight several Holy Roman Emperors felt for Schmelzer’s music. But if you total up all the time on this release, roughly 33 minutes is spent on the War Stories, and only 18 on the instrumentals. It doesn’t help that the texts for the former are printed in their original, localized 18th-century Bavarian dialect of German, and without translations: Simple as the style is, working through it gave me a bit of a headache. Nor does it help that, even if you want the whole thing, you still end up with under 52 minutes worth of content. The performances are excellent, but the vocal music is uninteresting, there’s far too little instrumental content, there are no translations, and the timings are poor. Only for specialists. | |
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