Boston Baroque and Martin Pearlman - Lost Music of Early America: Music of the Moravians (2021)

As they become acquainted with the musical history of early America, listeners seem to gravitate toward works that diverge from European models. William Billings showed up on Mormon Tabernacle Choir albums, and choirs of all kinds sing his music enthusiastically, while Alexander Reinagle is dutifully mentioned in textbooks but otherwise pretty much forgotten, even though no less a figure than George Washington championed him. The music of the Moravians, a German religious group that flourished (and continues to flourish, also known as the Unity of the Brethren) in an inland Eastern zone running from North Carolina northward, has likewise been neglected, even though Benjamin Franklin, who was in a position to know, characterized it as the most accomplished in all the colonies. Some of it is in German, but not all, so the language barrier can be only a partial explanation. The corpus of Moravian music in the U.S. is large, numbering some 10,000 compositions, but only a handful have ever been published.

This 1995 recording from the Boston Baroque choir and orchestra, therefore, covered music unfamiliar to most listeners, and its reissue is welcome. The music is organized into three seasonal "Lovefeasts" (the German word is Liebesmahl), but few stylistic distinctions emerge according either to season or to composer. Choral hymns, accompanied by a small orchestra, alternate with slightly longer anthem-like works on biblical texts, sung by a chorus or soprano soloist. It is these pieces that are most surprising: at a time when Billings was adapting archaic traditions of small-town English choral composition, the Moravian composers represented here seem to have been fully up on the latest sounds coming from the old country. A few of the larger pieces (none is more than four minutes long) sound as though they could have come out of a lesser-known work by Michael Haydn; the orchestral accompaniment isn't exactly striking, but it doesn't just double the voices either. The sunny simplicity of the music is intriguing. Few pieces have the sound of the old chorale treatments, and text like "für uns zum Opfer gemacht" (made a sacrifice for us) flounces by in major-key triplets. The music is full of pleasant tunes, and in all it sounds very much of its Classical period. Especially interesting are two works for trombone choir; there is also one short piano work. The classic New England choral sound of the Boston Baroque singers is ideally suited to this music. Full texts are given in German and English, but the words are clearly audible, in both languages, without referring to them. Somewhat less successful are sopranos Sharon Baker and especially Cyndia Sieden, whose fluttery vibrato is distracting; a soberer voice was called for. Still, Telarc did top-notch engineering work on this "Lost Music of Early America," and the recording is strong enough that the music may perhaps not qualify as lost for much longer. ~ James Manheim