Jan Dismas Zelenka
Jan Dismas Zelenka wrote Baroque sacred music of striking harmonic inventiveness and contrapuntal mastery: masses, litanies, psalms and Marian antiphons whose passion still startles in performance.
His centre of gravity was liturgical music for the Catholic court church in Dresden: more than twenty masses, litanies, psalms, hymns and antiphons, with a smaller body of instrumental works written in concentrated bursts. The part-writing is lucid, the harmony often bold, and the fugues and choral textures repay close listening. Festive psalm settings and Marian antiphons carry the same intensity that made his church music matter to musicians of his own century and to later revivals of the repertoire.
Compositions by Jan Dismas Zelenka appear on
O Rose So Red
Melbourne-based Schola Cantorum, directed by Gary Ekkel, present chants, songs and motets that honour the Virgin Mary across more than a thousand years of sacred repertoire.
The Litanies of St. Francis Xavier
A generous 2-CD set of Jan Dismas Zelenka’s liturgical music from the Schola Cantorum of Melbourne: the Litaniae Xaverianae, five Vespers psalms, the Magnificat in D and the Alma Redemptoris Mater.