The Sixteen - Buxtehude - The Times

The sensuality of Latin Baroque and Mannerist art, inflected through Italian musical language, has left its oblique mark on Dietrich Buxtehude's music. A new release from The Sixteen focuses on the Membra Jesu nostri, a cycle of seven cantatas written by the seventeenth-century composer "as meditations on the body of our Lord Jesus Christ".

Each cantata sets its scene with an instrumental sonata; introduces its subject by a motto or image from a Biblical text; and makes its personal response in arias in which a solo voice is gradually joined by others. Thus the final cantata Ad Faciem has voice following voice in an ardent imprecation to "make Thy face shine upon us", followed by a close-focus contemplation of the Sacred Head sore wounded.

Five of Harry Christophers's Sixteen create shifting patterns of darkness and light, and are accompanied by the violins, viols, chamber organ and theorbo of the Symphony of Harmony and Invention. And if you want to hear it all live, The Sixteen will be performing the work as part of the Aldeburgh Easter festival.

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