Cantica Obsoleta

NOTE: All of the music on this program is from rogue recording Cantica Obsoleta and features the ensemble Acronym. It is in the Olde Focus label and is FCR917. For complete information:

www.acronymensemble.com

ACRONYM presents Cantica Obsoleta, from the Düben Collection. The Düben archive consists of approximately 2300 music manuscripts, assembled by and named after a family of composers who served in succession as Kapellmeister (literally: “chapel master,” the director of music) to the Royal Swedish Court in Stockholm. Much of the music within the collection is unique, and the vast majority of it has neither been published in modern edition nor recorded. ACRONYM previously scoured the Düben Collection for sonatas that can now be heard on the ensemble's Paradise (Bertali) and Wunderkammer CDs. For this recording, they searched this treasure trove of seventeenth-century music for the most beautiful and fascinating works available. It is likely the first time any of these "forgotten songs" have been heard in hundreds of years.

Featuring:
Hélène Brunet, soprano
Reginald Mobley, alto
Brian Giebler, tenor
Jonathan Woody, bass

The Düben Collection consists of approximately 2300 music manuscripts, assembled by and named after a family of composers who served in succession as Kapellmeister (literally: “chapel master,” the director of music) to the Royal Swedish Court in Stockholm. The largest contributor to the collection was Gustaf Düben the Elder (1628–1690), but others included his father Andreas (1597–1662) and his sons Gustaf the Younger (1659–1726) and Anders the Younger (1673–1738), the latter of whom donated the collection to Uppsala University Library where it remains today.

Much of the music within the archive is unique, and the vast majority of it has neither been published in modern edition nor recorded. ACRONYM previously scoured the collection for sonatas that can now be heard on our Paradise(Bertali) and Wunderkammer recordings, and while doing so our interest in this unmined treasure trove of seventeenth-century music was piqued. This recording consists of some of the most beautiful and fascinating works found within the Düben Collection, and it is likely the first time any of these cantica obsoleta have been heard in hundreds of years.

Johann Heinrich Schmelzer (1620–1680), renowned as one of the finest violinists of his era, worked his way slowly through the musical ranks of Vienna. He eventually became the first Austrian Hofkapellmeister of the imperial city—succeeding many generations of Italians—before succumbing to the plague only a short time later. His Sonata a5 in D Minor shows the influence of Giovanni Valentini and Antonio Bertali in its use of irregular meters and surprising harmonic sequences. The opening sections of the sonata also survive (minus the viola parts) in a concordance in the Rost Codex in Paris. ACRONYM’s most recent CD is the first recording of Schmelzer’s oratorio Le Memorie Dolorose.

Johann Philipp Krieger (1649–1725) studied with Johann Rosenmüller in Venice and later traveled to Vienna, where he was ennobled by Emperor Leopold I on the basis of his fine organ playing. He won posts in Bayreuth and Halle and was eventually appointed Kapellmeister of Wiessenfels, a position which he held forty-five years until his death. Cantate domino canticum novum sets a lightly edited excerpt from Psalm 98.

Italian composer Giacomo Carissimi (c.1605–1674) was perhaps the last master of the Roman School of composition, which included several generations of Renaissance composers such as Giovanni Palestrina and Tomás Luis de Victoria. Carissimi is credited with having brought significant changes to the church cantata genre and to recitative singing in general, and he was the first major composer to write baroque oratorio. Doleo et pœnitet me is an example of the Latin Dialogue, an unusual baroque cantata style in which characters engage in a sung conversation on a sacred subject.

German organist and composer Christian Geist (c.1650–1711) joined the court orchestra in Stockholm in 1670, and he remained there under Gustaf Düben the Elder for ten years. Geist was employed as a composer and keyboardist (and apparently also as a copyist; a Sonata a4 by Johann Philipp Krieger—on ACRONYM’s Wunderkammer recording—survives only in Geist’s handwriting). He spent his later years as organist of several of Copenhagen’s largest churches before succumbing to the bubonic plague along with his entire family. The text of Selig, ja selig, wer willig erträgetwas written by Johann Frank (1618–1677).

Educated in Vienna and Dresden, Johann Jacob Löwe (1628–1703) was held in such high regard by his teacher, Heinrich Schütz, that Schütz recommended Löwe for appointment as Kapellmeister in Wolfenbüttel when the latter was only twenty-six years old. Löwe would eventually leave Wolfenbüttel for Zeitz, and he concluded his career as organist at St. Nicolai in Lüneburg, where he might have been one of several instructors to a young J. S. Bach. Löwe’s Sonata a6 in E-flat Major has an unusual sequence in which all parts are marked in 5/2 meter, despite each part only containing three beats per measure.