Kerll, Fux: Requiems CD review – Vox Luminis excel in Viennese double bill

Vox Luminis recording Kerll’s Requiem.

The excellent vocal ensemble Vox Luminis goes from strength to strength with its deftly inflected, pure, rather un-English singing. This pair of requiems lies distantly behind Mozart’s unfinished classic, since both composers held posts at St Stephen’s, Vienna. Johann Caspar Kerll’s 1669 mass, accompanied by only four viols and organ, is sombre compared with his big multi-choir masses, though the singers enliven it with tremulous quavering at Quantus tremor est futurus. Johann Joseph Fux’s more expressive writing is from a generation later; written for the funeral of a Holy Roman Emperor’s widow, its counterpoint uses a larger instrumental group, including a pre-Mozart trombone solo in the Tuba mirum: coincidence?