The Jerusalem Baroque Orchestra is back with another Bach Festival. Hortus Musicus (Estonia) and director Andres Mustonen joined the JBO for "Schütz and his Contemporaries"

Hortus Musicus (Pnina Even Tal)

 

With the anniversary of J.S.Bach's birth on March 21st, the Bach Festival  is once again under way. Under the auspices of the Jerusalem Baroque Orchestra and directed by JBO founder and artistic director David Shemer, Bach Festival VI opened with a three-day Baroque workshop for young musicians, topped off by a concert performed by participants.

 

For "Schütz and his Contemporaries", held in the conference hall of the Jerusalem International YMCA on March 14th 2022, the JBO was joined by Hortus Musicus (Estonia) and its violinist/director Andres Mustonen, who conducted the concert. Hortus Musicus and Mustonen are no new faces to Israeli concert platforms, neither was this concert their first collaboration with the Jerusalem Baroque Orchestra. Prof. Shemer opened the evening's proceedings by making chronological order for the festival: early Baroque repertoire will be performed before concerts of Bach's music.

 

In his 'Historical Description of the Noble Art of Singing and Playing' (1690), Wolfgang Caspar-Printz described the “three famous S’s” - court music director of Dresden Heinrich Schütz; Johann Hermann Schein, the choirmaster of Leipzig’s St. Thomas Church and Samuel Scheidt, the music director from Halle – as “the three best composers in Germany at this time”. They were close friends, working and living in the same part of Germany. Indeed, Heinrich Schütz (1585-1672) has frequently been referred to as the greatest German composer before Johann Sebastian Bach. Following his early set of madrigals, almost all of the Saxon-born’s known works are vocal settings of sacred texts, with or without instruments (he  received most of his training in Venice from Giovanni Gabrieli); these works remain pivotal repertoire of Protestant church music. Schütz' unique achievement was introducing into German music the new style of the Italian monodists without creating an inferior hybrid style; his music remained individual and German in feeling. At the Jerusalem concert, we heard a number of his sacred motets, the vocal roles performed by members of Hortus Musicus. One highlight was tenor Anto Õnnis' singing of "Venite ad me", his performance of the multi-sectional piece rich in timbre and dynamics and devotional in mood. 

 

Johann Hermann Schein was born within a year of both Schütz and Scheidt.  Although less in the limelight than Schütz, Schein (employed at the Thomasschule in Leipzig) was one of the most illustrious predecessors of J. S. Bach. His importance as a composer lies in the use he made of Italian monody and concerted style in Lutheran church music. Although the majority of Schein's output was vocal music, he is probably best known for the "Banchetto Musicale" (1617) a collection of twenty instrumental "variation" suites, all bearing an identical format. One of these suites made for a vibrant opening work to the evening's program, with Hortus Musicus' fine band of early winds (also the JBO's Alma Mayer-Nir) and percussion joining the JBO strings and keyboard to colour the various sections with timbral variety and vigour. (The instrumentation for these suites is not specified in the score.) While some of Schein's sacred music uses the sophisticated techniques of the Italian madrigal, Schein's secular music (for which he wrote all the words) includes such genres as drinking songs of surprising simplicity and humour. With much zest and witty banter, the Hortus Musicus singers' performance of songs from the 1626 "Studenten-Schmaus" (Student Banquet) collection suggested a focus more on drink than on banquet cuisine!  In Samuel Scheidt's canzon on "O Nachbar Roland", one of six large-scale canzons from his "Ludi Musici" (1621) and based on a melody popular in England, the composer had specified the use of viols, trombones, bassoons and optional cornetts. An ideal piece for the Jerusalem concert's joint ensemble, it provided plenty of opportunities for creative ensemble playing, with a variety of timbres created by diverse instrumental combinations producing constant differentiation of articulation and dynamics and giving the performance a playful swing.

 

Another contemporary, organist/organ technician Paul Peuerl was a German who spent his career in the Austrian towns of Steyr and Horn. Most of his surviving music consists of instrumental suites, free fantasies and a small number of texted Lieder with serio-comic texts. Of the latter, we heard a hearty reading of "O Musica" (1613).

'O Music, you noble art,

Much praise is lavished upon you,

For you bring great pleasure and entertain us,

Renewing our sorrowful lives.

Wherever you go, there is great joy

with dancing, singing and skipping.

Sadness rarely dwells with you,

Our hearts are aflame with joy.

O music, you noble art!'

 

Probably the least familiar of the composers representing early German Baroque music on this program, Johannes Schultz, of whose life and work little is known, worked as an organist in Dannenberg, Lower Saxony. He engaged in the writing of the ensemble canzona, a genre less common in Germany than in Italy, of which we heard the joint ensemble in two of contrasting character. 

 

Michael Praetorius' compositions also show the influence of Italian composers, as well as that of his younger contemporary Heinrich Schütz. Concluding the concert was a suite from "Terpsichore", Praetorius' sole surviving secular work (and the bread-and-butter repertoire for many of us in our early music training.) If the collection of over 300 dances takes its name from the muse of dance, Mustonen and the instrumentalists certainly endorsed this heartily, with playing of much colour, inspiration and energy. It is assumed that the collection was primarily intended to be performed on violins, but here the addition of the "buzzies" (of which there are too few players in Israel) certainly added to the excitement and vitality of the performance, as Mustonen led the players with relish and a sense of abandonment. 

 

For Baroque music aficionados, here was a fine opportunity to hear a representative collection of early German Baroque works. An extra advantage was hearing them played in the Jerusalem YMCA's conference hall, a space offering the audience closer proximity with the artists and the music-making experience.