Monarchs don’t always make great composers, though Henry VIII did pretty well. The 17th-century Holy Roman emperor Leopold I had an extensive output of music dramas, oratorios and sacred music inspired by the successive deaths of two wives. It is little surprise that the idiom is melancholy, deeply felt and rather beautiful. In his Stabat mater and motets and readings (with Latin texts translated only into German in the booklet), Leopold cultivates minor-mode choral writing, but in the fine Requiem at the heart of this disc he lets the sun shine in with brief sections in the major, rather like his contemporary Heinrich Biber’s Requiem. Clean but inexpressive performances.
