Michael / Weser-Renaissance / Cordes - Musicalische Seelenlust - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Michael Blake is South African composition's most important link to the American and British experimental traditions of the second half of the 20th century. It is a connection that derives as much from the composer's temperament and aesthetic sensibility, as from more conscious decisions relating to the socio-political positioning of composition. As regards the former, Blake's affinity with composers like Charles Ives and John Cage precedes his mature engagements with these composers through an embrace of certain qualities of openness relating to musical structure and material that can be heard throughout the works recorded on this album. Blake's Inchsong without wordsInch demonstrates deconstruction, playfulness, irregularity, irony and a postmodern referential sensibility. Apart from Inchsong without words,Inch which was written in 1972, the seven other works recorded on this album date from between 2008 and 2016, a period of mature compositional activity bookended by the composer's retirement to the village of Hout Bay near Cape Town late in 2008, and relocation to France in 2015.

The fifth concert in our series of InchMusic from Wolfenbüttel CastleInch features performances and recordings of multifaceted cantatas by Georg Caspar Schürmann. Like no other musician before him, Schürmann exercised a comprehensive influence on the Wolfenbüttel court music world during his more than fifty years of service there. During these decades he produced an impressively extensive and richly varied oeuvre almost thirty operas, numerous table compositions, a Passion, and various church cantatas for large ensembles are documented. In his Christmas cantata InchSiehe, eine Jungfrau ist schwangerInch we experience Schürmann as a composer of gripping ensemble compositions with finely chiseled fugue subjects. For many years the anonymous New Year's cantata InchNimm das Opfer unsrer HertzenInch was also ascribed to Schürmann. Although Georg Österreich is now assumed to have been it's composer, the opening aria in particular with it's highly effective postponement of the resolution of dissonances displays a clear stylistic closeness to Schürmann's opera arias from this time.

The WESER-RENAISSANCE ensemble had two goals in mind in it's concert series InchBreslau - A City in the Heart of EuropeInch the first was to offer musical enjoyment and the second was to remember an old cultural environment that had been forgotten for many decades. The music manuscripts and printed editions discovered in the Berlin State Library attest to the great diversity and high quality of music culture in what was once the capital of Silesia. InchDie Geburt unsers Herrn and Heylands Jesu ChristiInch (The Birth of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ), a Christmas narrative by Tobias Zeutschner, who was active at Breslau's principal churches St. Bernhardin and St. Mary Magdalene, forms the focus of the present selection from these sources in a program entitled InchWeihnachten i'm Breslau des 17. Jahrhunderts - Festmusik in der Kirche St. Maria MagdalenaInch (Christmas in Seventeenth-Century Breslau - Festive Music in the Church of St. Mary Magdalene). This early example of a Biblical history composition is richly scored for eighteen voices.