Cantus Colln’s main priority has always been to promote largely unexplored vocal repertoire of the seventeenth century from the German lands and central Europe. Here they have hit the jackpot again, following magisterial accounts of Rosenmuller’s Vespers (Harmonia Mundi, 2/97) and, most recently, Schutz’s Psalms of David (Harmonia Mundi, 11/98). The mainstay of this latest disc is two substantial works probably composed for special feasts in the luxurious recesses of Salzburg Cathedral during the 1670s and 1680s. Both are rarities (to my knowledge, newcomers to the recent catalogue) which in the grandiloquent Austrian vocal tradition provide a thrilling mid-baroque answer to the spatial principles of Venetian antiphony in Gabrieli’s day. Biber’s Litaniae de Sancto Josepho were written in 1677 for the founding of the Fraternity of St Joseph, a well-heeled group of local worthies, by all accounts. If not constructed on the massive scale of Paul McCreesh’s recent Biber extravaganza (‘Missa Salisburgensis’; Archiv, A/98), textural imagination is built here around contrasted solo and tutti vocal dispositions emboldened by trumpet obbligatos, calling to mind the splendid Requiem in A.
Cantus Colln and the pre-eminent cornett and sackbutters, Concerto Palatino, are plainly in their element, blazing a thrilling trail of dynamic declamation, manipulating colorific effect and always with a focused immediacy in the vocal line; this is achieved without notably characterful voices. Yet the seamless shaping in the solo litany, ‘present at Nativity and servant of Christ’, provides the essential lyrical contrast to extended full-throttled opulence. Muffat’s 24-part Mass of multiphonic strings, cornetts, trombones and trumpets perhaps hangs less convincingly, both as a work and in performance, but anyone who knows this composer’s often great instrumental writing will recognize the inimitable style of a man who had worked at close quarters with both Lully and Corelli. The Mass was long thought to have been written by another (it is Muffat’s only surviving vocal work) but the ‘Et incarnatus’ has the hallmark of the composer’s control of harmonic direction and tightly wrought inner-part writing. The ‘Crucifixus’, with its Neapolitan inflexions and muted trumpets in trochaic rhythm, is really extraordinary, almost Viennese at the end of the next century (Haydn actually owned the autograph for a while). As with so much seventeenth-century innovation, one wishes it went on a little longer. Again, the performances here want for little. One could quibble with the occasionally limited dynamic range (Biber’s Sonata Sancti Polycarpi for eight trumpets is too smoothed out at the edges and lacks the raw nobility of brass on their ‘uppers’ before battle) but this is a stunning achievement by any standards. The fragrant instrumental pieces relieve the danger of homogenous overkill and leave the listener relishing the next irresistible mosaic. Don’t hold back.'