The fifth concert in our series of “Music from Wolfenbüttel Castle” features performances and recordings of multi-faceted cantatas by Georg Caspar Schürmann. Like no other musician before him, Schürmann exercised a comprehensive influence on the Wolfenbüttel court music world during his more than fifty years of service there. During these decades he produced an impressively extensive and richly varied oeuvre: almost thirty operas, numerous table compositions, a Passion, and various church cantatas for large ensembles are documented.
In his Christmas cantata Siehe, eine Jungfrau ist schwanger we experience Schürmann as a composer of gripping ensemble compositions with finely chiseled fugue subjects. For many years the anonymous New Year’s cantata Nimm das Opfer unsrer Hertzen was also ascribed to Schürmann. Although Georg Österreich is now assumed to have been its composer, the opening aria in particular with its highly effective postponement of the resolution of dissonances displays a clear stylistic closeness to Schürmann’s opera arias from this time. © CPO