Here is a release both rare and curious. Frantisek Xaver Brixi was baptized in Prague in 1732 and died there in 1771. He was the most gifted member of a musical family and was appointed organist of St Vitus’s Cathedral, Prague, in 1759. He was also notably prolific as a composer, mainly in the sphere of sacred music of which over 400 works are preserved. The present recording features one of them, his oratorio Judas Iscariot. It is not an oratorio in the Handelian sense but conforms more with the type of Passion oratorios composed by Telemann in his later years, by Carl Heinrich Graun and by several of the Viennese musicians of the mid-century. These are altogether more modest in dimension and in dramatic impact, more closely resembling an elaborate cantata.
Brixi’s Judas Iscariot begins with a single-movement orchestral sinfonia which for all the world sounds like the overture to a Neapolitan intermezzo or opera buffa. Thereafter follows a strict alternating pattern of semplice and accompanied recitative and aria, seven pairs in all but in the last of which a short four-strand chorus replaces the aria. The dramatis personae in this Good Friday piece are Judas Iscariot himself (tenor) and the allegorical figures of Hope (soprano), Death (alto) and Justice (bass). There is no action, as such, but the text instead provides opportunities both for vivid tone-painting on the part of the composer, and contemplation on the part of the audience. Judas’s first aria, accompanied by strings and horn, is concerned with ill-omens and thunderbolts. Brixi’s vocal writing vividly illustrates this though Jiri Vinklarek only just manages to carry off the bravura without mishap. The tonal qualities of all the solo singers are pleasing enough, though neither tenor nor bass measures up technically to the most skilled baroque and classical practitioners currently in our midst.
What is unfailingly entertaining in this work is each and every one of the arias. These are in the early classical idiom and scored for strings either with horns, flutes or oboes. The strings of Musica Bohemica under Jaroslav Krcek are warmly textured, crisply articulate and highly disciplined. In summary, readers may well be a little disappointed by some of the solo singing, but are unlikely to be other than attracted by Brixi’s rhythmic vitality and his charming melodic gift. Worth a detour, as they say in guide books.'