Hammerschmidt and Rosenmüller – Gli Scarlatti/Arn

Some composers get lucky with their neighbors. Andreas Hammerschmidt drew Heinrich Schütz, which is a little like being a respectable painter in Amsterdam the same decade as Rembrandt — you may be perfectly good, even distinguished, and still spend four centuries in the shadow. Schütz himself knew better than to dismiss him; he wrote a dedicatory poem for one of Hammerschmidt’s publications, a gesture of real generosity from the most important German composer of the century toward a colleague working the same Lutheran vineyard with smaller tools but genuine craft.

This new disc from Gli Scarlattisti and Jochen Arnold — the second installment in the ensemble’s Hammerschmidt anniversary project, since nobody is entirely sure whether the man was born in 1611 or 1612 and the record industry has hedged its bets across two years of commemoration — moves through the liturgical calendar from Christmas to Pentecost. It is unfussy, well-prepared music-making, and it does something I appreciate more each year I do this job: it makes a case for a genuinely useful composer without overselling him as a lost genius.

Hammerschmidt’s biography reads like so many Central European lives of the period — dislocation, war, reinvention. Born in Brüx in Bohemia to a Protestant family, he found himself uprooted when the Habsburgs re-Catholicized the region during the Thirty Years War, forcing the family to Freiberg in Saxony. We know almost nothing certain about his training. Christoph Demantius and Stephan Otto were active there and he surely absorbed something from the local air, but the documentary trail goes cold, as it does for so many musicians of an era when war destroyed archives as efficiently as it destroyed towns and lives.

By 1639 he had settled in Zittau as organist of the Johanniskirche, a post he held until his death in 1675, and it was here — amid plague, occupying armies, and the general devastation visited on Saxon towns during the war’s later years — that he produced the bulk of his sacred output while somehow also accumulating a comfortable fortune and a citywide reputation. His tombstone calls him “the Orpheus of Zittau,” which is the kind of epitaph that tells you plenty about local pride and rather less about lasting historical stature.

The program here favors the small sacred concerto, Hammerschmidt’s natural habitat — pieces built from short vocal phrases tossed between voices and instruments with an unpretentious directness that owes something to the Italian concertato style filtering north but never loses its Lutheran plainness of address. “Also hat Gott die Welt geliebet” opens the Christmastide portion with a warmth that Arnold’s singers deliver cleanly, if without quite the tonal bloom I’d want in the upper voices — there’s a slight edge on sustained notes that period-instrument choirs sometimes acquire when the room is drier than the music wants.

“Vom Leiden Christi” is the emotional center of the disc, and rightly so. The recurring refrain — “Turn, o God, to our trouble; Christ, your blood makes all good” — functions almost like a chorale interpolated into narrative, a device Hammerschmidt uses with real dramatic instinct: the Passion narrative pushes forward, then stalls, circles back to supplication. It’s a small piece, five and a half minutes, but it has the shape of something considered, not dashed off between organ duties and civic obligations.

Elsewhere the “Oster-Dialog” gives us Hammerschmidt the dramatist — dialogue-motets were something of a specialty across German Lutheran composers of the mid-century, following models Schütz himself had explored more searchingly in his own dialogues. Hammerschmidt’s version is charming rather than profound, the vocal exchange handled with a good deal of textural variety though without Schütz’s uncanny sense of harmonic surprise.

The disc closes out with Johann Rosenmüller’s Dixit Dominus, a substantial fifteen-minute psalm setting that dwarfs everything else on the program in scale and, frankly, in ambition. Rosenmüller led an even stranger life than Hammerschmidt — fled Leipzig under suspicion of pederasty, rebuilt a career in Venice, absorbed two decades of Italian concertato and operatic style before returning to Germany late in life — and you can hear that Venetian seasoning all over this piece: bigger contrasts, more virtuosic vocal writing, a harmonic palette with more chromatic bite. It’s the most purely enjoyable thing on the disc, though its presence does somewhat upstage the birthday boy.

Arnold’s direction is sensible throughout — tempos unhurried but not draggy, balances reasonably transparent, continuo work (theorbo, organ, the odd viol) tasteful without calling attention to itself. I wouldn’t call this an indispensable disc. But it is a useful one, filling in a corner of the seventeenth-century German repertoire that specialist labels have only recently begun mapping with any thoroughness, and doing so with evident affection rather than mere archival duty. Not every composer needs to be a giant. Some just need decent advocates. Hammerschmidt has one here.