Gabrieli Consort & Players.,

It is an honour but also a challenge to try to convey even a particle of the beauty and power of this unique album. The concept was to recreate the sound and spirit of an early-Seventeenth Century Lutheran Christmas celebration in Denmark (or by extension, all Skandinavia and those parts of North Germany not engulfed by the horrors of the Thirty Years' War). Recorded in a cathedral, it features not simply the familiar Christmas music of Praetorius, but also instrumental selections by Scheidt and Schein as they would have been used along with the Praetorius -- and, perhaps very startling -- the Gospel chanted in German.
Unlike our degenerate age, when a church-service is typically fifty-five reluctant-minutes in the God-box before Sunday sports, church was long, complex, and demanding in those glory-days of Lutheranism. Granted that it was probably often turgid and boring, at its best, still, the devotion to rich liturgy was, again at best, a transcendant community devotion to God. If this sounds exceesivel, I can only invite musical and/or religious skeptics to give a few minutes to this recording. Although the total time passes an hour and a quarter, I suspect that a "real" service in those days might have been even longer, and if I'd been in training for it so-to-put), I would have asked for more.
The virtuosity and intensity of the performers is breathtaking, quite literally, whether the solo Cantor, or the massed choir in "In dulci jubilo" such that even after years of trying, I cannot imagine how mere mortals could sustain a chord so long. The delight of this album is such that I enjoy it all seasons of the year. The recording is up to the customary excellence collectors have come to expect from Archiv Produktion.… (mer)