Weckmann: Sonata a 4

For its first collaboration with Zig-Zag Territoires, the ensemble Les Cyclopes, which includes among others the promising young singers Eugénie Warnier, Damien Guillon, Robert Getchell and Benoît Arnould, presents a musical portrait of the composer Matthias Weckmann, who was born in Thuringia in 1616 and died in Hamburg in 1674.

This programme consisting of three cantatas, two sonatas, a harpsichord suite and the chorale ‘Komm, heiliger Geist’ played on the organ of St Ludger’s Church, Norden, aims to illustrate the different facets of his output, the fruit of his eclectic training and the atmosphere of intellectual ferment and philosophical openmindedness that reigned in seventeenth-century Hamburg.

After the Thirty Years War, a brilliant musical culture was able to flourish in the churches of Northern Germany. Organists such as Buxtehude, Scheidemann, Bruhns or Sommer, started to compose their own works. This new musical culture in the North of Germany fundamentally differed from what was going on in the Center or the South of the country.

In these regions there remained a scholarly and speculative conception of music, inspired by the humanist spirit of the Reformation. On the shores of the Baltic and North seas it was the prosperous Hanseatic League which considerably influenced musical life.

Aristocrats and burghers insisted that the members of local chapels should be allowed to practice their art, like the organists and musicians attached to the service of the different towns. Thus a generation of musicians was born. Assembled on this disc, their music probably never achieved the recognition it deserved.