Tyrolean Musical Treasures 25
(Double-CD-Set)
Innsbruck Court Music at Stams Monastery
This CD production documents a concert worth remembering. Presented to impressive effect in the splendid basilica of Stams Monastery in July 2002, it featured a selection of sacred music by the director of the Innsbruck court ensemble of singers and instrumentalists, Johann Stadlmayr (ca. 1575-1648). Stadlmayr is one of the most important artistic personalities in the extraordinary history of music in the Tyrol and a composer of international rank. His sacred works are among the best written in the domain of church music north of the Alps at his time. Stadlmayr’s contribution to the development of new forms and genres in sacred music is not to be underrated. In the course of his long period of creativity – in Innsbruck alone he was active from 1607 to 1648 – Stadlmayr left his mark on all major styles of the day, starting with the Netherlandish art of the motet, through the tonal splendor of Venetian polychoral music, to the subtle art of church music in the concertizing style, to which he gave a decisive impetus. This shows especially in the Missa super Bone Jesu dating from 1631 and rediscovered for this project. It is scored for two six-part choirs (soli and ripieno), two cornets and violins each, four trombones and basso continuo, applying the new stylistic principle of the virtuoso direction of voice parts and instruments astonishingly early and developing it in a fully valid fashion. The period’s whole range of varieties of expression is apparent in Stadlmayr’s magnificent Apparatus musicus, a collection of motets. Selected from this marvel of Baroque sound, which was published in Innsbruck in 1645, are ten particularly impressive motets. In their richly varied tonal splendor, some interspersed in the sequence of the mass, others following after it, they are thus reintroduced for the first time since their composition.
CD 2, Track 2, 1:33
Dum complerentur
Nr. 24 from "Apparatus musicus"