St Thomas’s Boys Choir| in the 19th Century

To the present day, the motet services at Leipzig’s St Thomas’s Church are a fixed event in the diary of the church’s boys choir. The church has been the hub of an extraordinary culture of polyphony and motet singing for centuries; a practice which had already demonstrated its outstanding quality even before Johann Sebastian Bach. The latter, however, set new standards and became the yardstick for the cantors who were to follow him: and indeed, all his successors measured themselves against Bach. In the nineteenth century, too, all cantors at St Thomas were equally well renowned as composers. On this disc with St Thomas’s Boys Choir Leipzig, Georg Christoph Biller presents a selection of motets by his predecessors. In addition to the highly prolific cantors of St Thomas’s church, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Albert Becker, and Johann Brahms can be counted among the promulgators of the unique style of Leipzig motets. The mixture of cantabile and polyphonic passages, solo and tutti sections, and the frequent use of an extended fugue are characteristic of many works of the Leipzig School, typically in true eight-part settings. The works recorded on the present CD have continued to be performed time and again at the motet and cantata services at St Thomas’s for almost 200 years – sung in masterly perfection by the world famous St Thomas’s Boys Choir Leipzig.