Hyper-dramatic spectacle, from a special place

Georg Muffat's only surviving sacred work is the Missa in Labore Requies for a huge complement of musicians: two choirs of voices and three of instruments, with basso continuo. This must have made a mighty noise and impressed everyone who heard it in Salzburg Cathedral. Unaccountably, this music has only been recently noticed; this is the third and by far the best of the versions that have been recorded. Johannes Strobl conducts the Cappella Murensis (24 singers), the Trompetenconsort Innsbruck (5 trumpets and timpani), and the 20 musicians of Les Cornets Noirs.

This is a really spectacular work; it has the hyper-dramatic spectacle of High Baroque French opera (Muffat may have studied with Lully), with the special oddness that Muffat and Biber bring to their music (an oddness I adore).  I heard the music in stereo only, though it really should be heard in Surround Sound, or even better, watched on Blu-ray or DVD, since the recording was made in a very special space: the beautiful Klosterkirche of the Benedictine Abbey Muri-Gries. However, a note in the booklet indicates that HD-Downloads are available from audite.de. The CD will be released on July 1, 2016.

Unfortunately there's no proper video up on the web showing these musicians at work in Muri. There is this story on Swiss Television that's agonizingly slow to load. Persevere, though, and you'll get a good feel for how Stobl arranges his singers and instrumentalists in this beautiful space. I'm assuming Audite will very soon post the Muffat video on YouTube with English subtitles, as they did with a previous recording of Gabrieli and Schütz in the same space, with the same musicians.


This is a well-filled disc at over 70 minutes. There are marvellous instrumental works by Bertali, Biber and Schmelzer to go with the Muffat Mass, which gives us a better idea of Muffat's musical environment as well as providing superb music from a special place.

Austrian violin music, with fireworks

The violinist Gunar Letzbor and Ars Antiqua Austria have come to the end of their 3-disc project to record all the music in Manuscript XIV 726 of the Minoritenkonvent in Vienna, and there's plenty of high quality violin sonatas left to make an entertaining, if low-key programme for the last CD, to be released May 27, 2016. Biber is the big name in this bunch, and his sonatas included here are the most substantial and serious works. The Forte Presto second movement of his F major sonata, no. 3, has a hair-raising beginning. Something is going on here: a battle scene, perhaps, or a storm. Maybe this is the Sturm before the Sturm und Drang. Biber is never conventional.

Though the violin part calls for an excellent musician, even a virtuoso at times (and Letzbor delivers on both scores), this music is about much more than the solo line. The continuo, provided by Ars Antiqua Austria's Eric Traxler (harpsichord or organ), Hubert Hoffmann (lute), Daniel Oman (colascione*), and Jan Krigovsky (violone), provide a varied sound that I suspect comes as much from the musical sensibilities of the group as it does from the scores from the monastery. This variety is welcome, though not as important once one comes to Biber's fireworks in the last part of the disc.

The first two discs in this excellent series, both highly recommended, are: Scordato, from 2015:

and Anonymous, from 2014:

* Yeah, I didn't know what a colascione was either. Also called a gallichon or a mandora, this is a bass lute.