Pfleger is unquestionably one of the most fascinating baroque masters of Northern Europe of the seventeenth-century. Embodiying the transition between Schütz and the heritage of Monteverdi on one side, and the music of Buxtehude and later Bach on the other, Pfleger’s music testifies to the musical culture of Northern Europe. Orkester Nord here proposes for the first time a full-length programme set up as one coherent dramatic work, connecting Pfleger’s key cantatas in order to form a continuous narrative, as told through the voices of its recurring protagonists. What emerges is the story of the life of Christ. A fascinating soundscape.Halfway between the style of Heinrich Schütz and the more modern style of Buxtehude and Johann Sebastian Bach, the music of the glorious unknown Augustin Pfleger (1635-1686) is fascinating in many ways, starting with a powerful spirituality. The author of Concerts spirituels and numerous cantatas relating the life of Christ, Pfleger’s work is religious first and foremost. Martin Wahlberg has drawn from this source to design this programme, whose connecting thread is the life and passion of Christ. It takes the listener through some significant works.

The programme offered here by Martin Wahlberg, his musicians and his singers, is a valuable testimony to the practices of Northern Europe. Based on Pfleger’s religious cantatas, it has been articulated to form a dramatic whole through the use of regional instruments that were very fashionable in the past and forgotten today, such as the ancient psalter inherited from the Middle Ages, a positive organ and a consort of viols. Recorded in 2018 in Norway, it is a sonic panorama of Baroque Scandinavia and seems to continue the tradition of previous centuries. – François Hudry