The Abendmusiken were a legendary concert series organised by Buxtehude in Lübeck. Even Johann Sebastian Bach travelled a long way to attend these concerts of sacred and instrumental music and met the master Dietrich Buxtehude, the most famous organist in Europe. To mark the 500th anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation, Vox Luminis and the Ensemble Masques have come together to perform a programme of cantatas and instrumental pieces. The recording assembles leading specialists of this repertory, with the expert voices of Vox Luminis combining with the vitality of the instrumentalists of Ensemble Masques.

“This is music of expressive variety and flexibility, ideally suited to the skills of Vox Luminis…They do not disappoint, charting the emotional contours of Buxtehude’s music with exquisite understanding and demonstrating their now familiar deep but lucid choral blend, out of which expertly executed solos emerge and return.”

—Gramophone
 
 

“Rich, lively and truthful, the recorded sound consummates a seductively considered disc that pretty much never puts a foot wrong. Hanseatic heaven!”

—BBC Magazine
 
 

“Only first-rate musicians whose supreme gift is the ability to listen – to listen to each other and to the composer” “This is a fine, atmospheric CD and would serve as a splendid introduction to anyone who thinks of Buxtehude simply as the father or the North German school of organists. There is a wealth of choral music there, which many people hardly know and these are alpha class performances .”

—Early Music Review