Heinrich Schutz isn’t a composer I was really familiar with at all when I picked this CD up. He was choir master at Dresden in the 1650s and 1660s from what I can gather and with this CD, Paul McCreesh has set himself the task of duplicating the experience of a Christmas vespers service in 1660s Dresden. So, this CD, jam-packed at 79 minutes opens with an organ prelude, moves on into some choral pieces and then gets into the meat of the CD which is two lengthier compositions by Schutz, an oratorio called The Christmas Story and his Magnificat. We wrap things up again with some more choral pieces and a benediction followed by an organ postlude. I think this is a pretty great concept for an album, trying to kind of duplicate the experience of a service; it gives you a conceptual framework in which to hear the music and understand how it would have worked as a part of the lives of the people who first heard it. I wish the music was a bit better however. I really like The Christmas Story oratorio; it clocks in at right about thirty minutes all told, divided into several recitatives and pieces for vocalists. A lot of this oratorio had to be reassembled by McCreesh due to it surviving in only fragmentary form and I don’t know how purists feel about this kind of thing, but I liked it. Susan Hemington Jones as the Angel is particularly good, with a really clear, effortless tone. And Charles Daniels does a great job with the recitatives, some of which are devilishly long, clocking in at over three minutes; Daniels has a nice, conversational rhythm and a perfectly smooth and flowing voice. So, I like that piece quite a bit, but, as you’ll notice, that takes up less than half of the CD. The Magnificat is a bit over fifteen minutes and even broken up by some carols by a children’s choir, I didn’t care for it at all. Very bombastic and labored in my opinion. All of the extra bits that open and close the album are variable. I really loved O bone Jesu which is about seven minutes long all by itself and really just achingly sad and beautiful. The rest of it started to feel somewhat like filler and I downright disliked the organ instrumentals. The Postlude in particular is the kind of thing I’m thinking of when I say I don’t like organ music, just a bellowing cacophony of formless sound. So, on the whole, I’m pretty mixed on this. I would say that I quite liked close to half of the album, found the majority of the other half to be mediocre and then there were a couple that I really hated. I mean, 79 minutes is just really long and I for sure would have liked this better if it had been trimmed down to feature The Christmas Story, maybe two choral pieces and the Magnificat. Even though I didn’t love the Magnificat, it makes sense to present it with Schutz’ Christmas Story since it is a Christmas piece and, if the album wasn’t 79 minutes, I probably wouldn’t have minded the 15 minute Magnificat. As it is, there’s a lot of good stuff here, but the album also features a lot of mediocrity and ultimately overstays its welcome. I guess they were trying to duplicate a church service after all. 2 ½ stars.
tl;dr – album duplicates the experience of a Christmas vespers service in the 1660s with mixed results; features a great Christmas oratorio, but the jam-packed CD includes a lot of mediocrity too. 2 ½ stars.