Bruhns, German Cantatas, Cantus Colln/Konrad Junghanel (Musique d'Abord), Kuhnau, Sacred Music, The King's Consort/Robert King et al (Helios). 
These two discs, issued last year, bring to light a couple of lesser known names from the German baroque. The impression that one gets that Europe at the time was awash with sublime musical genius makes me think that it is the prevailing style that is attractive and that anybody with sufficient acumen to compose within its discipline will sound tremendous to us, by which I mean at least me. By the same token, anybody alive today infatuated with installation art must think that we are living in a golden age.
However, Nikolaus Bruhns (1665-1697) was not destined to be a lesser light given his reputation before his early demise.Having been a student of Buxtehude at Lubeck, C.P.E. Bach reported that his father 'loved and studied' Bruhns' work and used some of it as models for his own. There isn't much of it left to us but these cantatas are evidence enough that he belongs in that saintly group of composers that departed this life far too soon.
These pieces are set for a small group of instumentalists and four voices, beginning with a wonderful interwoven funeral piece, Die Zeit meines Abscheids ist vorhanden, which doesn't sound immediately as mournful as one might expect for a bewigged late C17th German funeral. It is gorgeously considered and intricate to a measured and entirely comprehensible degree of complexity. Much more funereal (and equally intended as such) is Ich liege und schlafe ganz mit Freiden, which my German as well as Google translate tells me means 'I lie down and sleep with peace'. The lute and alto in the second part surpass the interchange between soprano and strings in the first. And nobody is ever going to convince me that highly stylized compositions in any art form are necessarily less expressive than raw, unbridled emotion or that people from warmer countries are somehow better at it than those from more forbidding climates.
I suspect we might not know what Bruhns looked like as a search for a picture of him finds me a portrait that I thought was Buxtehude and so I am wondering if that portrait is brought into service whenever a picture of a musician who was in the area at the time is required but perhaps that is a good thing. We have perhaps raised the personality of the artist to a previously unrequired importance. The discipline of the sonnet form made one Elizabethan sonnet-writer sometimes indistinguishable from the others and so it might be with German baroque composers. It might only be us that suppose that 'finding one's own voice' is preferable to excellence in composition or adherence to formal exigencies.
And while it will usually be the high line, the soprano or counter tenor, that takes my attention first or provide the most lasting impression, the tenors are given plenty of opportunity here in Paratum cor meum, not overly flamboyantly but with parts that take them on excursions until a final duet that one might say dances.
It would be an advantage to have a libretto with the disc but in fairness it was reasonably priced and one can't have everything. If one is interested enough one can e-mail someone who is good at German, which I have done, but I have no idea what the last cantata is about apart from that it was meant for Easter. And the words on the packaging suggest that the UK was only third on Harmonia Mundi's marketing team's list of target areas after Germany and France. And so perhaps, for once, David Cameron is right and we need to renegotiate our position in Europe. Marvellous disc, though.
The disc of Johann Kuhnau's Sacred Music does have the words with it. One is first struck by the difference in tone as, although there are only a few more musicians listed, it begins with the brass and a more spectacular gambit.
Kuhnau was another Lutheran who has spent most of his time dead 'in the footnotes' of Bach. I'm sure many of us would be glad to have been that good rather than spend the rest of eternity in a dark corner of the Poetry Library. But he was also a polymath with the law, several languages and being 'a theorist' among his other areas of expertise but more than any of those, I'd be most interested to find an English translation of his novel from 1700, Die musicalische Quacksalber (honestly, I couldn't make this up), a satire 'on what he considered to be the shallow and superficial trends in contemporary music'. It's a shame he didn't live long enough to hear The Saturdays. But just as soon as I've finished writing this, I'll be on the phone to Blue Square to see what odds I can have about my chances of finding a copy of that.
He took his music very seriously, which is an interesting point for the booklet to make. That doesn't mean it is limited by such seriousness, does it. Ken Dodd, among a number of other comedians, has taken great pains to think about his art but that doesn't mean that his act is to be taken seriously. Yes, missus, what a beautiful day it is but that is not quite the goofy Liverpudlian's ultimate point.
Deborah York puts in the required decorative if straight shift in the second cantata, Weicht ihr Sorgen aus dem Hertzen (Banish care from your hearts), and it is beautiful and I wouldn't complain if I only listened to such things for the rest of my life. But, having been told that 'seriousness' is uppermost in the composer's mind, I wish I hadn't been told that because it does start to sound rigid where Bruhns, within very similar constraints, was looser but lost nothing by it. I want to like Kuhnau as much as I immediately took to Bruhns but it isn't quite happening, given that the difference between such composers isn't much and surely nothing that my cloth ear could detect for itself. This music is, I'm sure, just as fine as Bruhns with all the little cadences and touches of the baroque that one buys it for, but I'm afraid that, having put these two together on one order, somebody was likely to finish second best and it is Kuhnau even if it might be that his apparently more difficult personality might have made him more interesting than the easier genius of Bruhns.
But I'm sure there is a lesson to be learned by Amazon in this. Both of these discs by lesser-known composers of the Deutsche baroque are exactly the sort of items that will persuade me to part with money and so, if they insist on sending me e-mails to say that I might like this or that, then they would do well to tell me about other things that are a bit like them. But recently, after I had made a very rare foray into buying pop music (the Kristina Train and Matchbox 20 albums- both excellent in parts), they thought they could encourage me to buy some more and, after recommending other albums by the same artists, the next thing on their list was the 10th Anniversary album of We Will Rock You. I don't think there is a CD that I would want to destroy any sooner than that one. They could have recommended almost any other CD in their whole catalogue and I'd have been more likely to buy it than that. Fuzzy matching and profiling by computer obviously still has some way to go before they can be considered to have a soul.
I'd like to think it would have made Johann Kuhnau laugh.