Cantus Thuringia TIME STANDS STILL

Hope? Time and again it is hidden at best. Consolation? A little, but it is subliminal at most. Sadness, grief, melancholy? These are present in abundance. Anyone who sets out to discover English music of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries will time and again stumble upon constants that left their mark on this music over an astonishingly lengthy period of time. The characteristics of melancholy may be found not only in the secular music of a Renaissance composer like John Dowland but also – several decades later – in the sacred music of two Baroque composers, Matthew Locke and Henry Purcell.

These two epochs share common features and complement one another amazingly well – “even though Dowland and Purcell each developed and cultivated a distinctive personal style, making it generally easy to recognize their authorship very quickly,” declares Christoph Dittmar, who functions as primus inter pares – the first among equals – in this new album from Cantus Thuringia. This congruity is all the more remarkable in that 132 years separate the year of Dowland’s birth from that of Purcell’s death. “By way of comparison take the elderly Telemann and the young Mozart – their lives overlapped, and yet their music is worlds apart.” It may be possible to explain this by reference to the English vocal and, more especially, choral tradition that evolved over a period of several centuries and that continued to leave its mark on composers such as Benjamin Britten.

According to Christoph Dittmar, what particularly attracted Cantus Thuringia to this programme was “the intimacy of the reduced resources, especially when compared to our previous recordings, which were devoted to a German repertory scored for relatively large forces. An additional factor was the interest shown by the recorder player Silvia Müller, who wanted to work with a vocal ensemble in her search for new challenges. “And so we chose pieces in which the recorder plays diminutions – embellishments – sometimes as the upper voice, sometimes as the middle voice. The recorder was extremely popular in England at this time and remained so until the eighteenth century, with entire recorder consorts being permanently engaged at certain courts.”