Editorial Reviews

Since this disc was originally released in 1997, recordings of Dietrich Buxtehude's vocal music have remained scarce. In fact, German lutenist and conductor Konrad Jünghänel and his Cantus Cölln have remained foremost among the music's champions. These cantatas deserve to be better known. Unlike Buxtehude's organ music, which points directly to Bach (who walked a few hundred miles to hear Buxtehude play it in person), his vocal music was written for an institution, the Abendmusik concerts in Lübeck, that had no precise parallel in Bach's life. Buxtehude's music for these concerts might be called para-religious. The concerts were not liturgical, but the music was intended to facilitate individual reflection and public morality (apparently failing on the latter score, for in 1800 the series was canceled on grounds of public disorderliness). What this means musically is a delightful range of dramatic effects and moods beyond what one would hear in Bach's cantatas, even though Buxtehude lived a generation before Bach and was not in a position to absorb the big operatic arias of the Italian High Baroque. Instead, he sets the text in vivid, small chunks that perfectly realize the texts, with a hugely varied deployment of solo voices, ensembles, and chorus, which in this recording simply consists of all the soloists together. The dramatic impact of a cantata like "Gott hilf mir, BuxWV 34" (track 2), in which a lone soul cowers before a flood and is reassured by a choir singing the words "Fear not: when thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee," is diminished in this kind of treatment (it's not clear whether the work was choral), but some of the cantatas depend more on solos, with the verses of the text given to different combinations, and these work better. "Ich suchte des Nachts, BuxWV 50" (track 4), a setting of a passage from the Song of Songs, is perhaps the high point of the program, with a text that probably wouldn't have been part of a liturgy, and a fine realization of Buxtehude's exquisitely evocative treatment of the nameless, restless woman pacing and longing for her lover. Compare these recordings to those on Ton Koopman's somewhat more flexible versions on his ongoing complete survey of Buxtehude's works; choices between the two may be a matter of individual preference, with this disc toward the more intimate end of the spectrum. James Manheim, All Music Guide

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