St John's, Smith Square, London
With an overall theme of "Hanseatic to Adriatic", this year's Lufthansa festival of baroque music tours Europe from north to south. This programme by the vocal ensemble Cantus C�lln under its director, Konrad Jungh�nel, focused on one of baroque's northern outposts, L�beck, and the city's most famous composer, Dieterich Buxtehude.
The main work was his Membra Jesu Nostri (The Limbs of Our Jesus), a cycle of seven cantatas contemplating the seven wounds of Christ and the parts of the body that bore them ? his feet, his knees, his hands, and so on, up to his face. Despite what might appear to be the penitential nature of such a spiritual exercise, Buxtehude provides a surprising degree of expressive variety in this setting for five voices and three-part string accompaniment.
Each cantata is introduced by a quotation from the Bible mentioning its particular limb. Those dealing with the side and the heart are prefaced by texts from the erotically charged Song of Songs, inserting a degree of sensuousness into material that might seem destined for pure austerity; one passage compares Jesus's blood to "sweet honey".
Bar the odd note pitched marginally flat, Cantus C�lln's singing was clean and tidy, respecting the cycle's solemnity rather than attempting to render its intensity by means of extreme vocal gestures. Their instrumental colleagues were more forward in this respect, violinists Ulla Bundies and Anette Sichelschmidt offering a striking sense of character in playing that was delivered with absolute unanimity. Jungh�nel's direction looked dogged while producing flexible results. Above all, the venue's acoustic qualities were splendidly displayed, allowing music ideal for its scale to resound with a perfect blend of clarity and resonance.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/may/19/cantus-colln-junghanel-review
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