Lautten Compagney - Time Zones (2020) [Hi-Res]

Again and again the loud compagney BERLIN attracts attention with unusually designed albums. With the worldwide highly acclaimed "Timeless", the skilful combination of the early baroque music of Tarquinio Merula with the minimal music of Philipp Glass has been achieved, the album "War & Peace" covers an exciting arc from the Thirty Years War to the time after the end of World War I, and the album "Circle Line" combines renaissance music by Guillaume Dufay with works by Cage, Monk and Glass - a fascinating sound journey with baroque instruments. The new album "Time Zones" combines music by the German early baroque composer Samuel Scheidt (1587-1654) with works by the French composer Erik Satie (1866-1925), who is today known above all for his sometimes tender, sometimes ironic piano pieces. On "Time Zones", the loud compagney under the direction of ensemble founder Wolfgang Katschner combines arrangements of selected piano pieces by Satie with instrumental works from important collections by Samuel Scheidt. The compositions selected by Erik Satie, including the famous "Gymnopedie No. 3" and the "Gnossienne No. 4", were arranged by Bo Wiget especially for this recording for the special instrumentation of the lautten compagney with its lutes, trombones and strings. In the case of Samuel Scheidt, the choice fell mainly on ensemble pieces from two large collections, the "Ludi Musici" and the "LXX Symphonies". Between 1621 and 1627 Scheidt published a total of four volumes of instrumental works under the title "Ludi musici". And already the 1st volume with its about 30 pieces amazes with an enormous wealth of dance movements. Interestingly, the composer almost always refrains from concrete indications of instrumentation, which leaves the interpreters, then as now, certain freedoms. Two decades later, Samuel Scheidt published the collection "LXX Symphonies", which are short three-part instrumental pieces for three voices, which were obviously intended as preludes and interludes for his sacred concerts or motets. In "Time Zones", too, the listener is simply amazed at how well the music of Samuel Scheidt and Erik Satie fits together - although there are almost three centuries between them. The production, which is also excellent in terms of sound, was created in Berlin as a co-production of deutsche harmonia mundi and Deutschlandradio.