I was most fortunate to find this important REB issue of musicologist Arthur Mendel conducting Schutz's "A Christmas Story." From 1950, it is a performance which most definitely heralds the beginning of a new movement in music, that of period performance.
If you have studied music history, you most likely would have spent some time with the epic "The Bach Reader," a virtual wealth of first hand documents which, at its core, presents a faithful "biography" of sorts on J S Bach. Arthur Mendel and Hans David spent years assembling this important tome and the excellence of the scholarship has meant that it has never gone out of print, some 50+ years after the publishing of the first edition. Mendel was a great scholar of the baroque while he primarily focused on Bach, Buxtehude and of course Heinrich Schutz.
Schutz's influence on the German "Protestant" baroque was immense, probably on the level of Beethoven's ninth symphony on all symphonists that followed him. Schutz's religious music is dramatic, stark & severe, and incredibly in "tune" with the spirit of the text. Bach, Handel, Telemann and knew of Schutz well and drew inspiration from his genius.
Mendel's performance is absolutely splendid. I believe the Cantata Singers are New York based, and they deliver committed singing while the orchestra is purposeful and sensitive not to overwhelm the singers. Compared with Grishkat on his recording from roughly the same time, Mendel delivers more drama and a highly stylistic reading. Frankly, I'm amazed that the recording dates from 1950 as it was made, by the way, about a year after Mendel published his edition of this masterwork.
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