Gottfried Heinrich Stoelzel (1690-1749) is a name known only to me on the periphery; but after hearing these magnificent cantatas, I can only say I wish I had made his acquaintance much earlier. He was the Kapellmeister at Gotha, a town in Thuringia, Germany, for 30 years, and greatly expanded the orchestra there into one of the most important in the country. He studied at the University of Leipzig and also Italy and Prague before taking up his first post, which he held only briefly before moving to Gotha.
The man was phenomenally prolific, on the order of a Telemann, and wrote in excess of 1200 cantatas alone, twelve complete yearly cycles. The first question you might ask is “does he sound anything like Bach?” This is a valid question, but the answer is not easy. I think you can honestly say that the spirit of this music, Lutheran in nature and partaking of those particular sentiments, does breathe the same air as that of the Leipzig composer. But the intricacies of the music are quite different, in some cases radically. Stoelzel’s chorales are far simpler than Bach, who was apt to involve the listener (or worshipper) in a far more complex winding-up of the final cantata statement with his multifarious web of polyphony and composite counterpoint. And his recitatives are unusual in that they are frequently multifaceted by the use of multiple voices, something Bach never did (the dialogues in the passions being a notable exception).
But let me correct myself lest I inadvertently make the mistake of posing Stoelzel as a simpleton—this is integrated, utterly fine-crafted music of the baroque period by a master of the art. I wondered when listening to this why his music has fallen so far out of the mainstream, but then so has Bach’s; the cantatas are virtually never featured on orchestral concerts, and only the more sophisticated church or local concert society are likely to program them, and if Bach’s cantatas can’t get played, how in the world can we expect Stoelzel to get any airtime? And that is a shame.
This is volume two of the six cantatas that make up his Christmas Oratorio. There were two cantatas for each day, one on the epistle reading as a text, and the other on the gospel. This is the latter, and according to the notes they are much more exuberant in nature that the epistle works. I can’t go into too many specifics as I would risk my bad German translation, and MD&G has carelessly given only the German texts, which does their French and English-noted fans little good. But I can state that they are delightful works that reward first-time as well as repeated hearings.
The two works that bookend the three Christmas cantatas are a Te Deum and New Year’s Cantata. Both are suitable to the occasions, festive and exultant. Rainer Johannes Homberg does a wonderful job mustering his forces to committed and finely wrought period performances, and this disc should prove a surefire stocking stuffer for that person who thinks they have everything in their collection. The SACD sound is well focused and balanced nicely, with perhaps just the tiniest bit of overdone reverberation.
[This is one of many “2+2+2” releases from MD&G on both SACD and DVD-A. They feel that for music in surround the center and subwoofer channels are not important, and instead they use those two channels for left and right height mics/speakers high above the front left and right speakers. The signals are compatible in standard 5.1 playback. We will shortly be featuring some feature review articles covering the 2+2+2 system and most of the discs using this alternative approach – which works well but takes some effort to set up…Ed.]
— Steve Ritter
