Dietrich Buxtehude was a legendary organist to hear whom Johann Sebastian Bach walked hundreds of kilometers. He was born in 1637 on the Danish coastal town of Helsingborg (now part of Sweden), but spent much of his life as an organist at St Mary’s church in Lubeck, Germany, where Bach went to hear him. This Da Capo recording of his vocal music reveals that Buxtehude was much more than a church organist. This is a beautiful recording made in DXD in 2010 at 352.8 kHz although I’m streaming it in 88,2khz. The liner notes show it was made using high quality equipment in a church in Helsingborg where Buxtehude was born. The voices and instruments sound incredibly natural and the ecclesiastical acoustic helps greatly.
What a long way the Roman Catholic Church, in particular the esteemed Vatican has come, in the past 1000 years. At one point, the hallowed music heard in the Sistine Chapel could not be performed outside it on pain of excommunication, which some undoubtedly regarded as a fate worse than death. As the legendary story goes, when the boy Amadeus Mozart heard the famous Allegri’s Misere’, one of the pieces recorded here, his mental tape recorder simply memorized the music allowing it to be performed outside. Now we have here a series of new recordings on DG of the Sistine Chapel Choir itself, the world’s oldest choir group continuously operating for a millennium. The recording made in 24-bit 96 kHz will come to many as a shock. You are bathed in the resplendent acoustic of the Sistine Chapel, below Michelangelo’s famous frescoes. The reverberation is so pronounced that the words are not as vividly heard as in a sterile studio recording. But the whole point of this and other albums in this series is to make you feel sonically that you are indeed in the Sistine Chapel. That it succeeds in doing splendidly. On the big 9 foot panels of my Soundlabs, the acoustic is overpowering. With my eyes closed I’m transported to the Vatican. It’s a marvelous sensation. But be warned. This recording may make you feel queasy because your room disappears. It’s a strange sensation indeed.
