The title Banchetto Musicale, taken from Schein's publication of 1617, is a reminder that a great deal of early seventeenth-century German instrumental music was written for ceremonial and social use. Increasingly, composers were required to write music that would dignify the status and enliven the activities of their employers, in the ballroom, at the table, and on grand occasions. The tradition of Northern European concerted instrumental music goes back much further, but the proliferation of printed music produced during the early decades of the seventeenth century is testimony to a new emphasis on both formality and entertainment in the many small courts of Protestant Germany.
The pieces on this record are taken from different phases of Schein's short career, which took him to the court of Weimar and then to St Thomas's Leipzig. They are played by the members of Hesperion XX with elegance, grace and sometimes a little too much interpretational sophistication for the slightness of some of the material. The decision to add un-notated percussion parts to some of the dance movements is welcome (as well as authentic), and some further variety could have been achieved by discrete improvised embellishment in some of the repeated sections. There is rather more musical interest in the youthful Canzon from the Venus Krantzlein, and particularly in the final Canzon which contains some ambitious contrapuntal passages. These pieces apart, there is much here to delight the ear in a fairly undemanding way, and Hesperion XX's suave performances are well supported by a generous acoustic and some sympathetic engineering.'