Collegium Vocale Gent & Concerto Palatino olv. Philippe Herreweghe

During his lifetime, Heinrich Schütz was already regarded as "The father of modern music". After several years of study in Venice under Giovanni Gabrieli, he was perfectly versed in the polychoral style that had been developed by the Italian specifically for St Mark's Basilica. When, years later, Schütz returned to the city, he learnt from Monteverdi how to translate textual rhetoric into musical terms. It would be a long time before his first religious pieces written in the new style appeared. Thanks to this lengthy process of maturation, the 'Psalms of David' not only provided seventeenth-century German music with a radical new stimulus, but also instantly became one of its highlights. Each psalm was unique, partly due to the virtuoso interaction between voices and instrumental accompaniment. Emotional contrasts were the order of the day, but were always text-driven. In the influential collection published by Michael Praetorius in 1619, he too had learnt the necessary lessons from the Italian innovations. After the Thirty Years' War, this sort of exuberance felt misplaced. Schütz' final chord in the 'Magnificat' speaks mainly of sober disillusionment.