Suspiria Mariana 2023

Motets by the South Tyrolean composer Augustin Grieninger

Until recently, Augustin Grieninger, a native of Margreid on the South Tyrolean Wine Route, was primarily remembered by posterity as an original poet and writer; his contemporaries, however, valued him even more as a creative and performing musician. Until recently, however, most of his musical output was considered lost. Thanks to new discoveries, for example from the former holdings of the Royal Prussian Library in Krakow, a more accurate picture of his compositional legacy can now be drawn: Augustin Grieninger, who worked in the southern German Augustinian canon monastery of Rottenbuch, is one of the most interesting and original monastery composers of the High Baroque period in southern Germany and Austria. His sacred motets bear witness to a masterful command of the craft of composition and musical rhetoric, i.e. the art of speaking in tones, as well as melodic inventiveness and a thorough knowledge of the latest stylistic developments in Italy. The ensemble vita & anima, made up of international specialists in early music, gives a comprehensive insight into Grieninger's sacred music for the first time - a real discovery!

Melanie Hirsch - soprano
David Feldman - countertenor
Raphael Höhn - tenor
Felix Schwandtke - bass
Ensemble vita & anima
Eva Saladin & Christoph Rudolf - baroque violins
Arno Jochem - cello, viola da gamba & violone
Andreas Arend - theorbo
Reinhild Waldek - baroque harp
Peter Waldner - positive organ