Musica Fiata - Scheidt: The Great Sacred Concertos (2007)

Schütz, Schein, and Scheidt, the three S’s of early-Baroque German Protestantism in Saxony, all close friends, were born in successive years but Schein died young in Leipzig while Schütz lived into old age in Dresden. Samuel Scheidt (1587–1654), on the other hand, spent his life in Halle, but the city suffered much more during the Thirty Years’ War than Dresden (Schein died before the worst of it). He has a longer entry in the current Bielefelder Katalog than Schein does, but I have only five discs entirely devoted to him in the CD era, and three of them are instrumental. (Another disc, 30:4, did not come my way, nor did Wilson’s earlier disc on this label, both of these also instrumental.) Neither of the two choral collections, “Concertus Sacri” (19:5) and “Cantiones Sacrae” (21:4), duplicates anything heard here, all drawn from “Geistliche Concerten,” nor can I find any of them on a currently available disc, so this program is welcome.

During Halle’s difficult war years, Scheidt wrote these pieces for small ensembles, just as Schütz also did, but he reworked some of them from earlier publications for larger forces and left other earlier versions in manuscript. Three of the pieces on this disc are found in such manuscripts, and Wilson has enlarged some of the other pieces from the spare lines of the published versions. The final work on the program, a splendid piece for triple chorus, seems to have been composed in 1638 for the installation of Prince August of Saxony. Freue dich , using two choral and one instrumental groups and written for a prominent wedding in 1628, is equally gratifying. Clearly, Wilson is trying to give us Scheidt’s music as he would have wanted to hear it. The singing and playing are stylish, for Wilson has been concentrating on the German Baroque for some time. Add this to your collection and enjoy the third and most neglected of the S’s.