The small chorus that calls itself the Sixteen, together with its director
Harry Christophers, has made numerous exemplary recordings of Renaissance and Baroque choral works, recording the music on its own Coro label and presenting it in compelling ways. The group doesn't have the purity of other Renaissance choirs, nor the power of other Baroque groups, but it has successfully combined enthusiasm with an intelligent approach to repertoire. The music by Heinrich Schütz presented on this disc is intelligently chosen: it is, to use a word from the liner notes by Derek McCulloch, minimalistic. These are small works by a composer who adapted Venetian polychoral splendor to a German context. Rich in symbolism and gesture, they demand involvement from the listener but repay it with profound experiences. The Musikalische Exequien, written as funeral music for a German aristocrat during the Thirty Years' War, is a set of three pieces for different forces, each with its own symbolic resonances.
Schütz's music, even when written on a small scale, demands a performance that defines large musical spaces, and the Sixteen doesn't quite provide that here. The performance is clear, gentle, and a bit restrained, but it lacks a certain intensity; European performances cross the boundaries of national traditions much more readily than they once did, but it must still be said that this is very English Schütz. There is nothing to object to in these performances, but with many of the heavy hitters in Baroque music (
Philippe Herreweghe,
John Eliot Gardiner top the list) having recorded these works, sampling of the competition is advisable. A warning to DJs: the first track on this disc takes almost a full 10 seconds to begin.