CD 13

Tyrolean Musical Treasures 11

Joseph Strickner, The Court Church in Innsbruck, about 1800, for which most of Ambrosius Reiner’s works were composed

Reiner was descended from a family of musicians. His father Jakob Reiner was the director of music at Weingarten Abbey and a composer of repute. In 1630 Reiner came to the court music ensemble in Innsbruck, where hewasemployedastheorganist. After the death of Johann Stadlmayr, the famous director of the Innsbruck ensemble of singers and instrumentalists, Reiner succeeded him in 1648. Ambrosius Reiner was a productive composer, who had his works (six large collections of masses, motets, litanies and psalms) published in Innsbruck by Michael Wagner. Of all of these many works, printed in the form of part books, only one collection of five masses has been preserved in its entirety. Fragments are in Marienberg Monastery (South Tyrol); the complete work is in the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Paris). Based on these sources, music for performance purposes was furnished by the Tiroler Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum for concerts recorded live for CDs. Reiner’s masses are completely modern for his time, their constant alternating between solo and tutti expressing the compositional idea of the missa concertata in ideal fashion. His meticulous determination of the instruments playing the individual masses is also remarkable. Tonal and aesthetic technique in such consistent form was hard to find among Reiner’s contemporaries. Featuring incisive brevity combined with an extraordinarily refi ned application of the Baroque tonal rhetoric, Reiner’s masses fully satisfi ed the demands of Sunday mass, which in those days was still embellished with wonderful works of art of this kind.

Track 21, 2:18
Kyrie from Mass Nr. 5
Ambrosius Reiner
(1604-1672)