The Austrian broadcasting company ORF is issuing an impressive series of early music recordings, the repertoire almost always remarkably obscure. This volume explores sacred vocal compositions by Rupert Ignaz Mayr (1646-1712), a German violinist and composer who worked at the Munich court from 1683. It was once thought that the Elector Max Emanuel sent Mayr to study with Lully in Paris but this now appears highly unlikely: Mayr was nearly 40 by the time he arrived in Munich and was presumably already thoroughly grounded in the Italianate style which resounds throughout all the music on this disc. After the War of Spanish Succession reduced musical life at Munich to tatters, Mayr became Kapellmeister for the Prince-Bishop at Freising, where he composed a succession of operatic-style contemplations in Latin for students at the Episcopal seminary.

One of these surviving religious operas, Fructus peccati, mors animae, is a substantial and impressive work that must have seemed bizarrely antiquated when it was posthumously published at Munich in 1717. Its mid-17th-century style is transparently descended from Carissimi’s oratorios, and it forms an enjoyable and dramatic contrast to a few motets for solo voice, violins and basso continuo and a couple of grander yet shorter choral pieces. The tenor Daniel Johannsen’s flexible yet sweet singing is outstanding in fiendish passages during Confitebor tibi. Sometimes the violins and continuo seem too close to the listener for comfort but Christoph Hammer and the Munich Neue Hofkapelle produce alert, masterful performances.