Franz Tunder is known as Buxtehude s precursor as the organist of St. Mary in Lübeck. His works offer the image of a multifaceted musician and composer, whose compositions were obviously influenced by the northern German tradition. This is reflected by the selection of rare compositions presented on this CD.

Pour son premier enregistrement chez Ligia, l’organiste Jean-Charles Ablitzer a choisi de revenir à l’un de ses orgues préférés, celui du temple de Belfort. En effet, par le passé, il nous avait proposé déjà deux enregistrements sur cet instrument, évoquant au travers des titres le Nord, par le voyage, le souffle ou son école avec le présent album. Il est vrai que l’orgue du temple Saint-Jean de Belfort est exceptionnel. Construit en 1984 par Marc Garnier, suivant les principes de la facture d’orgue nord-allemande magnifiée au XVII° par Arp Schnitger, cet orgue représente un modèle magnifique et sans compromis, de ce que furent ces instruments, portés au sommet par une école d’organites d’une incroyable fertilité et d’une immense variété. De plus le buffet a été copié sur des originaux, et celui ci n’est pas sans rappeler tel ou tel orgue célèbre. On pense à Altenbruch (près d’Hambourg) en particulier.

Constantly in search of eclectic and meaningful programmes, the soprano Anna Prohaska here celebrates ‘life in death’. An ambitious programme, conceived with Robin Peter Müller and his ensemble La Folia, which takes us on a journey across the centuries and through many different countries, with French chansons of the Middle Ages (including one by Guillaume de Machaut), seventeenth-century Italian pieces by Luigi Rossi, Francesco Cavalli and Barbara Strozzi, German composers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Dietrich Buxtehude, Christoph Graupner, Franz Tunder) and the English luminaries Henry Purcell… plus John Lennon and Paul McCartney. A musical and spiritual quest that even takes in a detour to North America with a universally known song by Leonard Cohen.

Although his name might not rate very highly on the recognition meter even of classical music buffs, Franz Tunder was a consequential entity in the early history of the German Baroque. Tunder served as organist at the Marienkirche in Lübeck from 1641 to his death in 1667, and during that time instituted the Abendmusiken, the first series of public concerts to take place in Germany. Seventeen vocal "concertos" exist from Tunder's pen and they were created for these special events; little more than half of them appear on this generous and well-performed CPO disc, Franz Tunder: Concerti. Conductor Hermann Max leads Das Kleine Konzert and the singing group Rheinische Kantorei in 10 concerti, which uses a variety of singers in frontline combinations. Tunder must have had some good basses in his chorus, as they have most of the hardest music in the Concerti, and five of these ten works are sung by bass or basses alone. Both men used here, Ekkehard Abele and Yoshitaka Ogasawara, do an excellent job. The string parts are crisp and do not dawdle, and Max never allows the music to get too grandiose, wisely keeping it within the boundaries of the chamber idiom to which it belongs. The music is never ornately busy and has a relaxed, soothing effect.

Death and Devotion Cantatas by Tunder, Weckmann, Buxtehude, and Ritter It is a remarkable fact that the most expressive and original vocal church music composed in Northern Germany during the latter half of the seventeenth century was the work not of cantors, but of organists. Some of this is due to the exceptional status which had been achieved by organists in cities like Hamburg and Lbeck in the course of the century; they had become both virtuosi par excellence, and at the same time learned composers.