Klaglied: German Sacred Concertos

'…all the performances are smooth and characterful, and the Purcell Quartet and their guests clearly relish the lugubrious texts which are so much a part of many of these pieces.'
Gramophone

Buxtehude's complete works for solo alto are coupled with two of his trio sonatas as well as by vocal works by Schütz, Geist and two early members of the Bach family.

Michael Chance and The Purcell Quartet are performing much of this repertoire as part of this year's Lufthansa Festival on 29 May at St John's Smith Square, London.

From the mid-seventeenth century northern Germany experienced a craze for the aria. Simple, tuneful, strophic songs first became popular in Königsberg in the 1640s and quickly spread along the Baltic to Danzig, Lübeck and Stockholm, and then beyond to Lüneburg and Hamburg.

These arias had sacred or secular texts; they were sung both in the home and, by professionals, at churches and courts. Some arias were quite worldly and the rise of the genre indeed coincided with the popularity of Italian songs in northern Europe. But most arias were devotional lieder whose musical simplicity suited a new spirituality in Protestant Germany. At the start of the seventeenth century Lutheran devotion was still founded on the chorales and homilies that Luther had written a century earlier.

By the 1660s devotion had become increasingly subjective and centred on the individual's emotional experience of God. The affective and accessible style of the aria was ideal for conveying the sweetness of personal communion with God, as well as utter humility before His might.

The Purcell Quartet was founded in 1983; their repertory encompasses the gamut of baroque music and they have established themselves in particular as leaders in the area of baroque chamber music. In 1999 they staged Monteverdi's last opera, L'Incoronazione di Poppea, in an extensive tour of Japan, and earlier had presented a critically-acclaimed sell-out Bach-Weekend at the Wigmore Hall in London. During their fifteen years together, the group has toured the world, including the USA, Chile, Bolivia, Colombia, Peru, Turkey, all the countries of Europe and have been regular visitors to Japan for over ten years. Future plans include a new production of Monteverdi's Orfeo, Purcell's Dido & Aeneas and a commemmorative Bach-Weekend at the Wigmore Hall to mark the exact 250th anniversary of his death.