The glittering city of Dresden, whose painstaking reconstruction after it was reduced to rubble in World War II is one of the great success stories of architecture preservation, is a hot topic in the Baroque music field, and this 2000 recording, reissued in budget form in 2010, offers a taste of the excitement. As the seat of the Holy Roman Empire's Elector of Saxony, the city was musically significant even before the rise to power of the man who really made its cultural reputation, August the Strong. Its most famous ...
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The glittering city of Dresden, whose painstaking reconstruction after it was reduced to rubble in World War II is one of the great success stories of architecture preservation, is a hot topic in the Baroque music field, and this 2000 recording, reissued in budget form in 2010, offers a taste of the excitement. As the seat of the Holy Roman Empire's Elector of Saxony, the city was musically significant even before the rise to power of the man who really made its cultural reputation, August the Strong. Its most famous musical resident in the early Baroque was Heinrich Schütz, who introduced the Gabrieli polychoral style to Germany; composer Caspar Kittel, whose music is broached here by the veteran Belgian historical-instrument ensemble leader René Jacobs and some superb singers and instrumentalists, was a short generation younger than Schütz, although he didn't live nearly as long. These arias and cantatas, Op. 1, published in 1638, were only the second publication in Germany in the new Italian...
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