Here's something unusual for the lover of unaccompanied music for boys' choir. The Dresdner Kreuzchor is a 120-voice choir of boys (SATB) that dates back to the Reformation. Its recordings offer something of a German counterpart to the tradition-drenched productions of English cathedral choirs. The group is mostly known for recordings of Bach and Schütz, but here it is deployed in the service of one of the enthusiasms of director Gothart Stier: choral music of the Romantic era. Almost the entire disc is devoted to German Romantic choral music, which was quite unusual in 1992 when this disc first appeared and is still rare enough that this Berlin Classics reissue should find a market. The sole non-German piece is a motet by none other than
Pablo Casals (track 10, O vos omnes), and it's quite a find in itself, with passionate overtones of
Casals' Bach performances. Much of the music is part of a tradition unto itself; it's deliberate, somber, and calm. There is one Mendelssohn work, but most of the music is from the late nineteenth century and some of it from the twentieth, ranging up to compositions from the circle of figures surrounding this Dresden choir itself. With 120 singers, the sound of the group is dense and rich, but every word of the text is intelligible -- something that's only going to help German speakers, for that's the only language in which the texts are given in the booklet (this despite two whole booklet pages being given over to a Berlin Classics catalog, and another being given over to gleaming white space). The bona fide classics included (the Locus iste of Bruckner and the Brahms piece that gives the album its title) are beautifully rendered, which should be enough in itself to recommend this disc for choral collections.