Home listening - magnificent Schütz and all things theorbo

The Guardian 0

Magnificat soar in Schütz’s Cantiones sacrae, Elizabeth Kenny excels in old and new music for theorbo, and Private Passions continues to delight

• Among the neglected figures of the musical past, one of the greatest is the 17th-century German composer Heinrich Schütz. He is often portrayed as a somewhat severe figure who lived through the horrors of the thirty years’ war and wrote austere Passion settings that foreshadowed Bach. But the music he composed over his remarkable 87-year life is full of vivid colour and invention, some of it learned in Italy, much of it born of his own powerfully spiritual response to the texts he set. There are big polychoral motets, which were memorably revived at the very beginning of the early music movement in this country by Roger Norrington and his Schütz Choir. Now the smaller four-voice Cantiones sacrae, Op 4 – 40 motets gathered together when Schütz was 40 – are superbly realised on a new recording by Magnificat under Philip Cave (Linn). The precision and agility of the ensemble is astounding, with intricate harmonic movement sharply characterised and captured. Gentle continuo support grounds the music while Amy Haworth’s soprano flies above the textures.

• Increasingly, early music soloists and ensembles are embracing the challenge of commissioning new music for old instruments. There are three examples on Elizabeth Kenny’s Ars longa: Old and new music for theorbo (Linn) – by James MacMillan, from a 2011 work, and two new ones by Benjamin Oliver and Nico Muhly – all stylish uses of the pungently plucked sounds of this large-size lute. The theorbo is these days most often glimpsed poking up from the continuo groups in orchestras for baroque opera, but Kenny reassures us that “it is also just another big guitar”. She frames the premieres with toccatas that sound like improvisations, hypnotic chaconnes that weave around repeated bass lines, and Robert de Visée’s lovely tribute to his fellow Frenchman, Les Sylvains de Mr Couperin.