About this Artist

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Editorial Reviews

This 1998 release from German countertenor Andreas Scholl was a natural for budget rerelease in Harmonia Mundi's Gold series. The reissue is unusually luxurious, with texts in German, French, and English and some great artwork in the booklet. The disc marked a change of pace for Scholl with its deliberate, pious, mostly sober mood, so different from the mercurial emotions of his recordings of opera arias. The word "German" in the title German Baroque Cantatas here denotes music that was popular in Germany rather than necessarily music that originated there; Scholl fills out the picture of the waves of Italian music that was played in Germany and influenced what's known as the German Baroque -- the picture that usually consists of a straight line running from Giovanni Gabrieli to Heinrich Schütz but actually involved other composers on each end. Scholl moves forward into the inward works of Bach's predecessors, and here he delivers superb readings of works by composers who are still neglected -- Buxtehude's "Klag-Lied," a lament on his father's death, and especially the "Lamento Ach, daß ich Wassers g'nug hätte" of Johann Christoph Bach, the so-called Eisenach Bach who was J.S. Bach's first cousin once removed. This dark-hued work, written to texts from the Lamentations of Jeremiah, uses the extremely unusual Phrygian mode, and both it and the Buxtehude tell the listener much about the mysterious interiority of J.S. Bach's religious expression. Other pieces are simpler and more outwardly devotional. Scholl manages the shifts in mood as smoothly as the ones between the registers of his voice -- the latter transitions are virtually indiscernible. About the only questionable aspect here is the playing of the instrumentalists, who accompany Scholl smoothly but are too low-key in the instrumental concertos offered for contrast; the generously titled "Sonata Quinta a quattro, viole da gamba o come piace aus La Cetra" of 1673 features intriguing violin replicas of the repeated-note vocal cadences common in music of the period, but the performances lack emphasis on these and other details. Nevertheless, this is a must for Scholl fans who missed this disc the first time around. James Manheim, All Music Guide

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