Sigfrid Karg-Elert
Das geistliche Chorwerk
Vocalconsort Leipzig
GewandhausChor
Gregor Meyer - director
Stefan Engels - organ
Genuin 2008
What does it mean to create sacred music between the late romantic and the modern periods? The Leipzig composer Sigfried Karg-Elert provided a most novel and complex answer that is worth exploring. Great pathos and individual, almost intimate feeling in the style of Max Reger are close together here. In the highly romantic canzone „Näher, mein Gott, zu dir“, the chorale that was allegedly played by the ship’s ensemble in the sinking of the „Titanic“ in 1912, Karg-Elert has not only dealt with the death of his friend, one of the musicians on the ship, but also with an emblematic catastrophe of the modern age.
The present CD, produced in cooperation with the Gewandhaus Choir, contains exactly the sacred choral music that takes up strikingly little space in Karg-Elert's work. It was very important to revive this aspect of his complete works, which is, above all, characterised by comprehensive and significant works for the organ, in during the anniversary of the composer's 75th year of death.
Stefan Engels, a downright Karg-Elert expert, was won over for this project. For several years, he has been working on in the first recording of Sigfrid Karg-Elert’s complete works for organ.
You can order the CD for 15 € (plus shipping) by contacting vorstand@vocalconsort-leipzig.de.
