Herzogenberg: Die Geburt Christi, Op. 90

[John Boyer]

I returned to Herzogenberg's late oratorio (1894) not long ago and now cannot sing its praises highly enough.  If you like Bach's cantatas, you will enjoy this very backward-looking take on the idiom -- a Baroque sacred oratorio in Romantic garb.

I have the Hänssler recording, which I think very fine in almost every respect: nice sound, good performances.  The caveats are modest.  The texts are summaries rather than full transcriptions of the words, the tracking is limited (there only three, one for each part of the oratorio), and the track listing is wrong (all the more inexplicable given there are only three tracks to begin with).

I now have the CPO on order.  CPO fits the whole action on one disc (79 minutes) to Hänssler's two (82 minutes total), which is an advantage, and CPO divides each part into multiple tracks.  This is all to CPO's credit, but it is hard to imagine they will beat Hänssler's great sound and performance.  We will see.

[Justin]

John, I have listened to both and prefer the Hänssler recording due in part to the enthusiasm of the performance as well as the sound quality. More care seemed to be put into the presentation of the CPO liner notes and booklet, but you have the best of both worlds between these two recordings.

A perfect example of your statement about the mix between Baroque and Romantic styles is at the end of Gelobet sei der Herr in Part III, where you have the lovely chamber music cadence with the strings.