Classic FM Magazine
DISC OF THE MONTH

He's a Hall of Fame big-hitter, but there's far more to Johann Pachelbel than his thrifty Canon.
Two fine ensembles unite, bringing life to a forgotten Pachelbel gem.

Some news this month, fresh from the gleaming spires of Oxford. It concerns Johann Pachelbel - you know the chap, composer of that beautifully spacious yet understated Canon that rests on the ears like slices of chilled cucumber. Well, it turns out that Pachelbel's music isn't so much cucumber as chilly pepper, as witness the latest masterpiece from the elusive genius to have surfaced from dusty obscurity: his arresting spirited and utterly individual setting of the Vespers.

Where - you may be poetically declaring to Pachelbel's Vespers once you've heard it on this CD - have you been all my life? The answer is Oxford's Bodleian Library. At least, that's where the manuscripts have been since 1978, before which a cavalcade of characters including Pachelbel's son Carl, London organist Marmaduke Overend and his pupil the composer William Boyce took charge of them. The scores lay undisturbed in Oxford until 2009, when Baroque music specialist Kah-Ming Ng discovered them, gnawed by generations of sagacious Oxford rodents but otherwise eminently decipherable.

What Ng had stumbled upon was, in his own words, 'a summation of all that is endearing about 17th-century music'. Three centuries on from the Vespers' creation, he summoned his own Baroque ensemble Charivari Agréable and vocal group The King's Singers to a Gloucestershire church last June to breathe life into the Vespers for the first time since it was presented at the St Sebald Church in Nuremberg by the composer himself. The microphones of Signum Classics were on hand to ensure Pachelbel's reputation could at last be bolstered by a work of significant size, scope and vision.

And what an utterly more manifold character Pachelbel appears in his Vespers than in the plain beauty of his Canon. First of all, Pachelbel is passionate. Wander into St Sebald's one Sunday evening in the 1690's - as you do - and your senses would have been overawed by the most musically spectacular ecclesiastical celebration in the whole of protestant Germany. Pachelbel reached the summit of his creative powers when he returned to his hometown at the dusk of his creative life and wrote a series of Magnificats and Response settings for the church's Vespers services. What does the music sound like? Well, it's invigorating, sensitive, heartfelt and gloriously melodious.

This you can decipher even from Pachelbel's opening setting of the Vespers' responses. When he sets the words Domine, ad adjuvandum me festina ('O Lord hasten to help me') his music slips onto new and agile wheels as his five singers, weaving individual lines until now, are suddenly united in anguish. But the composer doesn't leave it there. He then asks those singers to pleadingly repeat the word festina ('hasten') at the apex of the musical phrase, before they collapse into frenzied imitative repetitions of the word. The effect is wonderfully effective - like a physical reaching upwards towards the deity. In this eight seconds of music alone Pachelbel sets out his stall as a composer of significant and individual talent.

Ng's musicians go on to perform four other settings of the opening Responses - none of them resting on the previous one's laurels - and two of his finest Magnificats, which also contrast markedly in design. In the first in C, there are more examples of Pachelbel gifting long, expressive lines to the individuals within the vocal ensemble and then suddenly thrusting them together as a choir to give emphatic weight to particular phrases. It's in the Magnificats, too, that you get an impression of Pachelbel's significant skill in instrumental writing suggested so beautifully by his famous Canon. His instrumental passages intricately weave the work's melodic themes around one another with the ease you expect from Bach. And when the two solo voices intone the 'Gloria' towards the end of the first Magnificat, they seem to become instruments themselves; shape, blend and sensitivity to the meaning of the words exudes from every musician. Pachelbel would hardly wish for better 21st-century advocates than these.

Andrew Mellor

The Times http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/cd_reviews/article7064333.ece

There’s much more to Bach’s predecessor Pachelbel than his famous Canon. In every genre the 17th-century German knew how to charm, softening German rigour with Italianate vocal flourishes, as heard in this collection of long-forgotten Protestant church music. In solos, some of the King’s Singers’ voices lack sufficient heft; but joined together they bond into a bright rainbow of colours — just right for the music’s sunny demeanour. Bouncy instrumental support from Kah-Ming Ng’s Charivari Agréable.

Geoff Brown

BBC Music Magazine
UNBEATABLE. NOT TO BE MISSED.

The marriage of the King’s Singers and Charivari Agréable has created the ‘dream-team’ for this enchanting addition to the late middle-Baroque repertoire. There are five ‘Ingressi’, the opening sentences of Vespers together with the Gloria, and two Magnificat settings. Sandwiched between are two five-part instrumental sonatas by Johann Caspar Kerll, richly textured, with inner parts as active as those above and below.

The ensemble is unbeatable. The six King’s Singers blend superbly, yet each becomes distinctive and expressive in their prominent moments, for instance the fugue setting of ‘Sicut erat’ ending the third Ingressus with each entry pointed clearly before the voice recedes into the ensemble. Charivari Agréable in turn play as if singing, breathing between phrases and virtually texted in musical dialogue such as the final ‘Sicut erat’ of the third Ingressus. Even alone (in the second Vespers’ sonata), their phrasing is pierced with rhetorical silences.

High points include the Gloria of the first Magnificat, slow and contemplative, as if awestruck, with suspended dissonance piled on dissonance. The minor mode generates striking harmonies too in the fourth Ingressus, and this exposes an ingenious choice bassoon instead of cello or gamba in the bass.

The sound is excellent, clarity exemplary. Not to be missed.

George Pratt

For those who know Pachelbel only through the Canon, this disc will be revelatory. The music, unearthed and edited by Kah-Ming Ng, comes from a manuscript now in the Bodleian Library. It's not a complete Vespers setting, but includes five settings of the Ingressus and two Magnificats, all composed for a rich-textured ensemble of voices, strings and continuo. The influence of Monteverdi is evident in the music's contrasts of scoring and of mood, and in the sheer delight Pachelbel takes in writing virtuoso passage work. But there's also some counterpoint that looks forward to Bach. Each piece is beautifully served by the ensemble.

Stephen Petitt

RECORDING OF THE FORTNIGHT
Classical Music

Pachelbel is no longer a one-hit wonder. The Vespers fragments from late 17th-century Nuremberg show a craftsman who approaches greatness in passages such as the sensuous Quoniam from the E-flat Magnificat. Consistently engaging is the vigorous pacing in the chorals works and sonatas by Kerll and Krieger, the singers' luscious yet clean-cut sound justifying the transposition of the Verspers fragments.

The Oxford Times http://www.oxfordtimes.co.uk/leisure/8112088.A_lucky_find__musicologist_and_conductor_Kah_Ming_Ng_discusses_rediscovered_music_by_Pachelbel/

A vibrant, pioneering recording of tuneful and joyous music.

Giles Woodforde

Gramophone

Beyond the Canon: re-discovering the choral music of Pachelbel

This is quite an ear-opener … attractive pieces, full of euphonious writing. The Singers' brisk cheerfulness is infectious, and there's nothing wrong with the solo work in the most memorable section, the slow, thoughtful, Gloria from the Magnificat in E-flat. The strings of Charivari Agréable complement the singers admirably and offer more delight in sonatas by Krieger and Kerll.

Richard Lawrence

Westdeutsche Rundfunk
http://www.wdr3.de/tonart/details/artikel/wdr-3-tonart-54173114cf.html

Eine echte Entdeckung … eindrucksvoll, vielseitig, völlig in sich geschlossenes Ensemble … gefühlvoll …

Die Erstaufnahme von Pachelbels Vespermusik hat das Kirchenmusikrepertoire um einige Kostbarkeiten bereichert. Daß die einzeln Sätze aber auch wirklich zu einem Hörgenuß werden, das ist vor allem den King's Singers und dem makelos-aufspielenden Ensemble Charivari Agréable unter Kah-Ming Ng zu verdanken.

Jan Ritterstaedt

Radio New Zealand
http://www.radionz.co.nz/concert/programmes/pressingon/23_and_28_may_2010

This recording is certainly well researched, for not only do we get various of Pachelbel's vespers, they're also interspersed closely with other pieces by contemporaries of a very similar ilk. Generally speaking, this is yet another successful disc by The King's Singers … sprightly, packed with character and obviously meticulously put together.

http://www.dilettantemusic.com/reviews/editorial/pachelbel-vespers
AMG (All Music Guide)

One of the best kept secrets about Johann Pachelbel is his sacred music, both that he wrote it -- his omnipresent Canon in D and imposing output for the organ tends to obscure this point -- and that it is of such excellent quality as it is. Little of it has been recorded prior to British label Signum's Pachelbel Vespers, featuring the commanding talents of The King's Singers and period instrument ensemble Charivari Agréable under the direction of Kah-Ming Ng, and the specific works on this disc have never been recorded by anyone. Most likely composed in Nuremberg for the church of St. Sebald during Pachelbel's last years, the manuscripts containing Pachelbel's Vespers settings were deposited for safekeeping in the Bodleian Library at Oxford by one of Pachelbel's sons, Charles Theodore Pachelbel, shortly before his departure for the American Colonies around 1733. These works have lain, practically untouched, until the advent of this recording.

What a remarkable discovery they are! St. Sebald was one among only a few Lutheran churches in Germany still utilizing the old Latin texts for Vespers services in the early 1700s, and Pachelbel was an expert hand in such settings; by the time Johann Sebastian Bach began writing mass movements in earnest in the 1730s the practice was altogether extinct. The Magnificat in C major heard here -- transposed down from E flat major -- contains one of the loveliest settings of the Gloria made by anyone, with the word "Gloria" sung out in lengthy, unbroken lines of melody containing hair-raising, wide-ranging leaps. Those looking for more of the attractive instrumental texture of Pachelbel's overly familiar Canon in D will find it in several spots among the instrumental parts in these pieces. Ng, The King's Singers and Charivari Agréable are working all in concord here, all serving as stars of the show but not getting in the way of each other, and the music unfolds with summit after summit of glorious, breathtaking music. This has certainly got to be one of the top classical discs of 2010, given the high level of performance and the rarity and significance of the repertoire. Anyone who considers themselves devoted to the Baroque really should not miss this, though one is tempted to say that this disc is good enough to please just about anybody. For the sake of variety, two instrumental sonatas by composers close to Pachelbel -- Johann Krieger and Johann Casper Kerll -- are included and played very well by Charivari Agréable. However, Pachelbel's vesper settings are of such quality that you might hardly notice the sonatas.

Dave Lewis