Knüpfer: Sacred Music – The Kings Consort/Robert King

Somewhere in the vast shadow Bach casts over Leipzig there is a whole company of Thomaskantoren nobody remembers, and Robert King has made something of a specialty of dragging them into the light. Sebastian Knüpfer got there first, more than a generation before Bach took the job. On the evidence of this disc, he deserved better from history than total obscurity punctuated by the occasional line in a reference book.

The biographical facts explain a good deal about the music. Knüpfer’s father was a Kantor in Asch, in the Vogtland borderlands, and the son had eight years of rigorous humanist schooling at the Gymnasium Poeticum in Regensburg — poetry, philology, rhetoric, the whole apparatus of a mind trained to read a text closely before ever setting it to music. That training shows. Repeatedly. When he arrived in Leipzig as Thomaskantor in 1657, the city’s musical establishment was still recovering from the Thirty Years’ War: choirs depleted, instrumentalists scattered. Knüpfer rebuilt it, more or less from the ground up, and in doing so helped make Leipzig the musical capital that would later make Bach’s career possible.

What strikes you immediately, hearing these eight sacred works in sequence, is how little Knüpfer sounds like a placeholder in the story of German church music. “Transitional” gets thrown around too easily by musicologists trying to be polite about minor figures. Knüpfer isn’t minor, and he isn’t quite transitional either. He’s his own man, working somewhere between the stile antico contrapuntal rigor of Schütz’s generation and the more flamboyant Italianate concertato style that would flower in Buxtehude and, eventually, Bach.

Take “Die Turteltaube läßt sich hören,” the disc’s closing showpiece: five voices, paired violins and violas, bassoon, four trumpets, timpani, continuo. Grand forces for a text about a turtledove’s voice being heard in the land. You’d expect pastoral intimacy, maybe a solo violin cooing away in imitation. Instead Knüpfer opens with the full brass-and-timpani apparatus blazing away, before yanking the texture back to almost nothing for a single violin, alone, tracing that first line about the dove’s voice. The gesture lands with real wit. It’s theatrical without being remotely secular in feeling, and it tells you Knüpfer thought in terms of dramatic contrast the way a good preacher thinks in terms of rhetorical contrast: building, releasing, building again.

“Quemadmodum desiderat cervus,” the “As the hart panteth” text so beloved of composers from Palestrina onward, gets pared down here to solo bass, five-part strings, continuo, and the plainness of the scoring only intensifies the yearning quality of the line. Peter Harvey, or whichever of the three basses King assigns the piece (the documentation is frustratingly vague on this point), sings with an unforced gravity that never curdles into sanctimony. Elsewhere the ensemble singing has that King’s Consort house sound — clean, blended, slightly cool in the English cathedral manner. That’s not necessarily how a seventeenth-century Leipzig congregation would have heard it, but it’s a defensible choice, and an exquisite one on its own terms.

The solo roster is enviable. Carolyn Sampson’s soprano has that silvery, perfectly focused quality she’d go on to bring to countless Bach and Handel recordings. James Bowman, by 1999 well into his fourth decade of professional singing, still commands real authority even if the voice has lost some of its earlier bloom. You can hear the wear if you listen for it, though the musicianship covers a great deal. Charles Daniels and James Gilchrist divide the tenor duties with the kind of textual sensitivity this repertoire demands and rarely gets.

Is everything here first-rate Knüpfer? Probably not. Some of the hymn-based concertos, “Vom Himmel hoch” and “Was mein Gott will” among them, rely rather heavily on chorale-tune paraphrase and don’t always transcend their models the way the freer settings do. But “Ach Herr, strafe mich nicht in deinem Zorn,” with its penitential intensity, and the Babylonian lament “Super flumina Babylonis” both reveal a composer capable of real harmonic daring: chromatic inflections that anticipate, however distantly, the expressive world Bach would inherit and expand.

There’s no competing disc to speak of, which makes King’s advocacy doubly valuable, and slightly maddening, since it means we’re stuck comparing Knüpfer only against himself. Still, this disc earns its place. Anyone who thinks German Baroque sacred music began and ended with two or three canonical names should sit with this record for an hour. They’ll come away chastened, and grateful.