Caveat emptor -- with the purchase of this disc, he or she is getting neither a work called Das jüngste Gericht nor even necessarily music by the Danish/German Baroque composer Dietrich Buxtehude. North German group Weser-Renaissance has made a name for itself with sensitive performances that are nevertheless essentially investigational in nature. Here they take up parts of a lengthy work that, like Bach's Christmas Oratorio, is somewhere between a cantata cycle and an oratorio, and was apparently meant to be performed on successive evenings. No title for the work is known. It is surmised to be by Buxtehude, based on its presence in a collection of manuscripts in Stockholm (a city with which the composer was closely associated) and also on alleged stylistic evidence. The latter point seems weaker; the harmonic palette of the music is restricted compared with that of many other sacred vocal works by Buxtehude. It touches on the theme of the Last Judgment but is not the flood-and-guts scenario that might suggest -- it's sort of a morality play, aimed, the notes tell us, at Buxtehude's well-heeled merchant audiences in North Germany and intended as a warning to them to curb their stylin' ways. (It is not known who wrote the libretto; it may have been Buxtehude himself.) The women, as usual, are singled out: "Because the daughters of Zion are proud and go strolling with stretched necks and painted faces," runs one aria (track 4), "come stepping in and strutting, and wear exquisite shoes on their feet, the Lord will shave the heads of the daughters of Zion and take away their jewels." The music consists of choruses, some of them chorales, with a discourse like that of a Greek chorus, with individual parts for the Seven Deadly Sins, Jesus, divine voices, and good and bad souls; the characterization is light but recognizable, and the individual parts combine into attractive duos and trios. The soloists of Weser-Renaissance are just right for the small dimensions and serious tone of the music, but the one-to-a-part choruses of Weser-Renaissance don't work well here -- chorale-based music loses its congregational resonances with this approach, and the preponderance of trios in the music loses its impact when the trio is just a slightly smaller quartet. Even if the music is less effective than that heard on other recent Buxtehude vocal recordings (check out the version of Membra Jesu nostri by the Sixteen, or by the German group Cantus Cölln), this disc, no matter what the music was called or who wrote it, offers an intriguing historical document. Casual listeners won't need this, but serious German Baroque collectors will find something new (or old) and different here.
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