Martin Herzberg - Art of Dreaming - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Deak / Apple Hill Chamber Players - Musical Fantasies [COMPACT DISCS] date 11/19/1996

Archie Shepp - Looking at Bird [COMPACT DISCS] date 07/29/1994

With Seelenfrieden, tenor Martin Platz, the lautten compagney Berlin, and their artistic director Wolfgang Katschner present an impressive recording of 17th-century sacred music. The program combines vocal and instrumental works by Johann Philipp Krieger, Heinrich Schütz, Andreas Hammerschmidt, Dietrich Buxtehude, Johann Rosenmüller, and Johann Theile - composers who sought musical forms of expression for comfort, trust, and inner reflection during a time of profound social, political, and religious upheaval. The album focuses on psalm settings and sacred concertos whose texts touch on fundamental existential questions fear and distress, lamentation and supplication, but also confidence, trust in God, and hope. Martin Platz, a member of the ensemble at the Nuremberg State Theater, interprets these sacred texts with extraordinary clarity and depth. His tenor voice combines a natural, effortless tone with precise articulation and a fine sense of musical rhetoric. The words always retain their weight; emotions are not displayed, but developed organically from the text. The result is an interpretation that is both emotionally immediate and stylistically reflective. The lautten compagney Berlin accompanies and comments on the stylistically confident vocal performance with the tonal transparency and stylistic sovereignty for which the ensemble is internationally renowned. The instrumental sound remains agile, colorful, and breathing; the continuo sensitively nuanced; the lines clearly contoured. Under Wolfgang Katschner's direction, a dialogical musical performance unfolds in which words and sound interpenetrate and deepen each other.