The sound alone could convince a skeptic. Four galleries, two organs, an ensemble of zinks and trombones whose timbres haven’t been heard in this church at full strength since the Thirty Years’ War ended — and Audite’s engineers caught all of it with a fidelity that makes competing polychoral recordings sound like they were made in a gymnasium.
Let’s start with the space itself. The Abbey Church of Muri, tucked into Canton Aargau in German-speaking Switzerland, is not just any resonant stone box. It was the ancestral burial church of the early Habsburgs, a dynastic connection that gives the place a gravity beyond mere acoustics. Music designed for antiphonal deployment across multiple galleries — the idiom that Giovanni Gabrieli perfected in San Marco and that Heinrich Schütz brought back to Germany like intellectual contraband from Venice — this music needs a room with memory, with depth, with the kind of reverberation that blurs attack and sustain into something almost theological. Muri provides exactly that.
Johannes Strobl understands this instinctively. His earlier recordings here — the Christmas preludes, the Music for Two Organs with David Blunden — already showd a director who hears architecture as a musical parameter, not just a disc condition. Here, with the Cappella Murensis and the period ensemble Les Cornets Noirs deployed across those four galleries, the results are simply remarkable. The ensemble is compact — eight voices, a handful of strings, two cornetts, six trombones, two organists sharing the Brossart instruments, a violone in G anchoring the bottom — but the music projects with the authority of forces three times the size.
That violone deserves a moment’s attention. The instrument is a forerunner of the modern double bass, tuned a tone lower than the familiar orchestral instrument, and its particular darkness of timbre gives the bass lines here a weight that no modern double bass could reproduce. Matthias Müller and Tore Eketorp play with quiet authority — you feel them more than hear them, until suddenly you hear them very clearly indeed.
The Schütz pieces are the heart of the program. “Saul, Saul, was verfolgst du mich?” — that astonishing SWV 415, scored for six voices, two violins, and basso continuo — was one of Schütz’s most theatrically conceived works, the text depicting the moment of Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus, and Strobl and the Cappella Murensis give it exactly the urgent, slightly hallucinatory quality it demands. The spatial effects, even heard in SACD stereo rather than multichannel, are arresting. The opening Schütz work establishes the disc’s register immediately: deep, burnished, ceremonial without being stiff.
Gabrieli’s contributions — drawn from the Sacrae Symphoniae — are played with a lilt that too many period ensembles miss. The “Canzon primi toni a 8” in particular moves with genuine rhythmic energy, the zinks and trombones trading phrases across the acoustic divide with an ease that suggests long familiarity with both the idiom and the space. Les Cornets Noirs takes its name from the distinctive black leather covering of the Renaissance cornett — the zink — and its players, Gebhard David and Bork Frithjof Smith, produce exactly the reedy, slightly nasal tone that gives this repertoire its period-specific character. In lesser hands, zinks can sound like kazoos with pretensions. Here they sound like what they are: the most expressive wind instruments of their era.
The four organists — Blunden, Markus Märkel, Jörg-Andreas Böttich, and Angelika Hirsch — handle the two Brossart organs with intelligence about their complementary roles. The Evangelienorgel and Epistelorgel together provide both low-end mass and a silvery upper register that sparkles without hardening. Synchronization across such distances is never trivial, and there are occasional moments where the ensemble’s spatial distribution creates tiny coordination seams — but they are genuinely few, and in a repertoire that practically demands some degree of human imprecision, they feel appropriate rather than troubling.
The sopranos Siri Karoline Thornhill and Stephanie Petitiaurent blend with a naturalness that eludes many period vocal ensembles, and the tenor quartet — Rolf Ehlers, Jürgen Ochs, Mirko Ludwig, Manuel Warwitz — provides the kind of textural richness in the inner voices that polychoral music absolutely requires. Simon Schnorr and Kees Jan de Koning anchor the bass lines with clarity and weight.
This disc won the 2013 ICMA award for best Baroque vocal recording. Deserved. Completely, unhesitatingly deserved. In a field crowded with competent polychoral releases, this one does something rarer — it makes you feel the original acoustic and ceremonial purpose of the music, the way it would have fallen on Habsburg ears in a room that smelled of incense and cold stone. That is not a small achievement.—Track Listing
Heinrich Schütz (1585–1672): “Herr, unser Herrscher,” SWV 27; “Saul, Saul, was verfolgst du mich?”, SWV 415; “Ich danke dir, Herr,” SWV 32; “Zion spricht,” SWV 46; “Vater Abraham,” SWV 477; “Jubilate Deo,” SWV 262
Giovanni Gabrieli (ca. 1554/57–1612): “Canzon primi toni a 8” from Sacrae Symphoniae (1597); “Sonata pian e forte,” C. 175; “Canzon in echo duodecimi toni a 10,” C. 187; “Jubilate Deo” a 8, C. 68; “In ecclesiis” a 14, C. 196
