Three composers called Praetorius are featured on this disc from Freiburg’s outstanding early-music choir, the Balthasar-Neumann-Chor. Two are related: Hieronymus, born in Hamburg in 1560, and his son Jacob; then there’s Michael, an influential late-16th-century theorist who wrote a lot of hymns and even more dances. What the conductor Pablo Heras-Casado has put together, however, is a selection of two Magnificats, plus motets written mostly for weddings, setting sensual texts from the Song of Songs. Jacob’s Quam Pulchra Es, with its quietly yearning harmonies, sounds very secular indeed. Recorded in a spacious studio rather than an echoey church, the precisely tuned voices resonate, but the harmonies are clean enough for each unexpected twist and crunch to register beautifully, and the choir revels in the echoey spatial effects of Hieronymus’s Tota Pulchra Es. A full complement of accompanying instruments is used, including brass, strings and organ, but their contributions are mostly subtle, enhancing the texture without upstaging the voices.
