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 perform a program of chants, songs and motets used to capture the nature of Mary over the course of more than a millennium.
The Litanies of St. Francis Xavier
Explore some of this exquisite choral music on this generous 2-CD set featuring the Schola Cantorum: the Litaniae Xaverianae, five psalms, the Magnificat in D, the Alma Redemptoris Mater composed by Jan Dismas Zelenka.