Kammerchor Hannover: Bach & Sandström

The works of Johann Sebastian Bach have always been a point of fascination for the Swedish composer Sven-David Sandström (*1942), and they have inspired him to write his own music. In addition to writing a St Matthew Passion on the basis of the libretto by Picander, the Scandinavian composer also grappled with the texts employed by the great cantor at St Thomas in his motets. This inspiration generated stunning works that reveal their beauty particularly through their artistic juxtaposition, as exemplified on the present CD: ‘Jesu, meine Freude’, ‘Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied’, and ‘Fürchte Dich nicht, ich bin bei dir’ by Bach, and Sandström’s ‘Der Geist hilft unsrer Schwachheit auf’, ‘Komm, Jesu, komm’, and ‘Lobet den Herrn alle Heiden’. Under the baton of its director Stephan Doormann, the Kammerchor Hannover delves deep into these ingeniously designed works: Baroque elegance and craftsmanship in Bach’s pieces, enrapturing clusters and complex rhythms which demand the highest sensitivity of the vocalists in Sandström’s compositions. The plasticity with which the well-known texts are clothed in new sounds is stunning. Indeed, Bach himself was a composer of contemporary music in his day – and a visionary who transcended far beyond the things fashionable at the time. Indeed, Stephan Doormann’s comment on Bach’s motets holds similarly true for both composers: ‘craftsmanship and emotion can be experienced afresh time and again in his works: I am awestruck every time, and enjoy the pieces’ diverse layers. One can never fully know this music.’

Kammerchor Hannover
La Festa Musicale
Stephan Doormann

 Gramophone Magazin - CD-Review (Juni 2015, David Vickers)

"The result is a thoughtful and thought-provoking blend of the familiar and the unexpected [..]. The Bach performances (accompanied by La Festa Musicale) are tidy and precise - faultless for contrapuntal clarity.[...] Sandström’s works stand on their own expressive and idiosyncratic merits."

www.musicweb-international.com (Mai 2015, Göran Forsling)

"[...] they are superb: intonation faultless, great precision, dynamically flexible [...].The recording is excellent too – that kind of excellence that you don’t actually notice.[...]It becomes more and more obvious that Sven-David Sandström is the undisputed master of choral writing in our time."

 Neue Deister Zeitung - CD-Besprechung (April 2015, Charles Martin Loeffler)

  "Eine spannende CD, bei der das instruktive Hörvergnügen im Vordergrund steht."

Neue Chorzeit - CD-Besprechung (Mai 2015, Ute Schalz Laurenze)