This disc represents one of a number of attempts to fill in the landscape of German music between Schütz and
Bach -- a landscape that
Albert Schweitzer once famously characterized as filled with hills rather than mountains. The program offered by this excellent agglomeration of Saxon musicians, playing pieces that originated in their own region, doesn't do much to refute
Schweitzer's description, but it includes a lot of simple, festive music that anyone can enjoy at Christmastime. All the pieces were apparently labeled as being for Christmas use, although some, like Christian August Jacobi's Also hat Gott die Welt geliebet (For God so loved the world that he gave his only son...) would seem odd choices for that season. The music here comes from around 1700. What the
Bach cantata enthusiast comes away with is a new appreciation for how important the subjective cantata texts of Erdmann Neumeister and his followers were to the artistry of
Bach's sacred music: the composers here could write big choruses that, though shorter than
Bach's, were no less splendid, but they were working in forms that were essentially simpler than
Bach's, where religious sentiment seems to pour forth with the passion of an opera. These cantatas consist of an opening chorus, often with trumpets and drums, perhaps preceded by an instrumental sinfonia, and followed by a set of text stanzas that are given in turn to a set of soloists. Two of the pieces woodenly run through soprano, alto, tenor, and bass in order; the others use the vocal combinations to express the text in some way. The scope is limited -- the choruses around about three minutes long, and the individual solos mostly about a minute. But there's an attractive simplicity about the whole thing, partly because the ensembles involved -- the
Sächsisches Vokalensemble, the
Batzdorfer Hofkapelle, and a quintet of soloists -- give fresh testimony to the high level of musical accomplishment in medium-sized German towns. This is not an essential Christmas disc, but it will please any
Bach lover who tries it out.