German baroque masterworks for countertenor and strings Buxtehude’s fame rests principally on his keyboard music but this disc explores his outstanding vocal works, set in the context of J.S. and J.C. Bach. Each of these composers worked in important centres of Lutheran music in seventeenth and eighteenth-century Germany. Seventeenth-century German composers quickly adopted the new vocal styles that burst onto the scene in Italy at the beginning of the century: monody, in which a single voice declaims a text with special attention to the emotion and meaning of the words, and in the concerto style, consisting of opposing bodies of sound.
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