These Vespers settings by Heinrich Biber were recorded in 2004 in a couple of churches in Connecticut and New York, featuring the
Yale Schola Cantorum and its founder and director,
Simon Carrington, together with the Yale Collegium Players. The best news from the performance standpoint is that this young group, composed of Yale graduate students and undergraduates, sounds terrific, with four little-known but fine soloists. The light texture of the voices works beautifully in Baroque choral music, whose original choristers would also likely have been youthful. The group is not even drawn from music-student ranks but is open to all Yale students by audition, and
Carrington showed that a well-rehearsed American choir could achieve results fully on a par with their European counterparts. The directorship of the choir has since passed to Japanese Bach master
Masaaki Suzuki, and this recording whets the appetite for the music they will produce together. What you get here is something of modest dimensions, but unusual and beautifully done. The Vesperae longiores ad breviores, published in 1693, are not of a piece with the composer's splendid and gigantic masses; instead, they're more intimate pieces. They do not have the experimental quality of Biber's so-called "Rosary" sonatas for solo violin, but they have the same inward, reflective quality, and the inclusion of one of those sonatas here effectively fits the mood. Biber's work has been incompletely transmitted, and
Carrington fills it out with appropriate music by other composers. One of these is a simple but lovely Ave maris stella setting by the Habsburg emperor Leopold I. Another highlight is a compact, highly expressive Magnificat by Biber (track 11). The album was a good pick for reissue by Germany's Carus label, for it makes a significant contribution to the slowly evolving understanding of one of the 17th century's key composers.