Ludger Rémy, Telemannisches Collegium Michaelstein - Gottfried Stölzel: Cantatas for Pentecost 1737 (2004)
EAC | FLAC | Image (Cue & Log) ~ 326 Mb | Total time: 68:11 | Scans included
Classical | Label: CPO | # 999 876-2 | Recorded: 2002
EAC | FLAC | Image (Cue & Log) ~ 326 Mb | Total time: 68:11 | Scans included
Classical | Label: CPO | # 999 876-2 | Recorded: 2002
Gottfried Stölzel was a highly skilled, sometimes exceptionally inventive composer among whose gifts was the ability to devise extremely economical yet musically involving, textually illustrative, structurally refined, motivically fluent cantatas. It’s nowhere near great music, but much of it is quite good, clearly written for singers of some accomplishment, with leanly-scored yet often imaginatively colored orchestral accompaniments. Here are six cantatas from cycles written in 1735/36 and 1736/37, first performed together in pairs for Pentecost services in 1737. Added to the end of the program is another, earlier work that shows a marked stylistic contrast to the later pieces. Most of these cantatas begin with a short chorus, sometimes containing what sounds like a full-fledged fugue that dissolves as quickly as it begins, and then proceed through a couple of arias and recitatives, ending with a chorale.