Johann Rosenmuller’s life and output is a fascinating capsule of the mid-seventeenth-century professional musician: versatile, stylistically receptive and caught delightfully on the creative cusp of traditional Renaissance craft and evolving contemporary values. In Rosenmuller’s case, his cosmopolitanism was founded on a solid German education, Schutz-style work abroad (partly brought on by an imminent charge for pederasty which may have contributed to his staying in Venice for 24 years) and the eventual trek home. This anthology of instrumental and vocal music presents Rosenmuller as a composer who, in the former, mastered the shift from dance suites to bold and diverse rhetorical sonatas of the kind which Buxtehude and the following generation refined. The most startlingly original instrumental music can be found in his set of 12 sonatas which Rosenmuller published two years before his death in 1684. Some may remember that three of these memorable works featured in Cologne Musica Antiqua’s pioneering three-LP set of chamber music before Bach (10/81 – nla).
Included here are five such pieces and most welcome they certainly are; the combination of Rosenmuller’s contrapuntal control, rich and nobly scored homophony (often sounding as if there are more instruments than there really are) and unpredictability makes for an involving experience. He is certainly a composer who reaches well beyond surface senses. The King’s Noyse play this music with vitality and a keen understanding of each work’s overall structural implications. Less compelling are those sections where opportunities are missed to expand the potential of the melodic line through imaginative changes of colour (matching transparency with a richer tonal palette), accentuation or rhythmic flexibility. And intonation is, as I observed in their recent recording of music from the Buckeburg Court (11/96), not always what it should be. Even with a few particular misgivings such as these, the vocal sacred concertos convey many of the vital ingredients of Rosenmuller’s art. Ellen Hargis delivers the text with brightness and fervour, highly effective in Jubilent aethera and deeply affecting in the splendid setting of In te, Domine, speravi. The instrumental ‘commentaries’, often in quasi-dialogue with the solo voice, make the very most of the composer’s integrated vision of vocal and instrumental expression. If not universally inspiring, this is a recording which nevertheless makes a strong case for an undeniably fine composer.'