Gottfried Stölzel was a highly skilled, sometimes exceptionally inventive composer among whose gifts was the ability to devise extremely economical yet musically involving, textually illustrative, structurally refined, motivically fluent cantatas. It’s nowhere near great music, but much of it is quite good, clearly written for singers of some accomplishment, with leanly-scored yet often imaginatively colored orchestral accompaniments. Here are six cantatas from cycles written in 1735/36 and 1736/37, first performed together in pairs for Pentecost services in 1737. Added to the end of the program is another, earlier work that shows a marked stylistic contrast to the later pieces. Most of these cantatas begin with a short chorus, sometimes containing what sounds like a full-fledged fugue that dissolves as quickly as it begins, and then proceed through a couple of arias and recitatives, ending with a chorale.

Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel was a highly esteemed composer mentioned in the same breath as Bach, Telemann, and Handel. Today his name has largely vanished from our concert programs, but not from the cpo catalogue. Stölzel did remarkable things in the field of sacred music, as demonstrated by previous releases on cpo, but the label now presents the composer’s chamber music.

The Academy of St Martin in the Fields was founded in 1959 by Sir Neville Marriner and a group of London’s leading orchestral players. Originally formed as a small conductorless string group, it spearheaded the 1950’s Baroque revival.

Une compilation d'oeuvres du grand Jean-Sbastien Bach pour son pouse. Un incontournable de toute bibliothque musicale ! Cadeau Anna Magdalena Bach de son poux Jean-Sbastien, ce petit livre deviendra vite un album familial. Leurs fils (Johann Christian, Carl Philipp Emanuel, Gottfried Heinrich) l'utilisent galement pour leurs essais de composition. Pour autant, ce livre est aussi ouvert aux autres compositeurs de l'poque. On y trouve des partitions pour clavier (principalement des menuets, marches et polonaises) mais aussi des chants et des chorals. Cet enregistrement est servi par certains des plus grands artistes actuels de l'art baroque rassembls autour du claveciniste Olivier Baumont : Anne Magout, Christine Plubeau, Aurlien Delage et Julien Chauvin.

The Habsburg Imperial Court was a melting pot of many different cultures in which the zest for living of southerners, the Slav melancholy, French formalism, Spanish courtliness and the original German-speaking Alpine cultural region intermingled. Together with his Ars Antiqua Austria ensemble, Gunar Letzbor occupied himself over a ten year period to produce this 10CD "Klang der Kulturen" box, a musical tour of the individual countries that formed the roots of and influences on the music of baroque Vienna, documenting them in live recordings, with each CD representing one country.

There is hidden treasure here. Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel (1690-1749) has long lain in the shadow of Bach and Telemann, but if there is any justice this recording of his setting of one of the popular passion texts of the early 18th century will go far toward effecting long overdue recognition. Composed in 1725, it follows in the wake of a number of other versions of the poetry of Barthold Heinrich Brockes, most notably that of Handel, whose comparitively second-rate work pales into near insignificance when set beside the power and vivid immediacy of Stölzel's great drama.