Commemorating the 70th anniversary of Hugo Distler’s death, two successful vocal ensembles from Leipzig perform together on a single CD for the first time. The three- and four-voice motets recorded by the young ladies of the Sjaella sextet and the five young gentlemen of the Ensemble Nobiles represent some of the highlights from Distler’s choral oeuvre: the Jahrkreis op. 5, and the Geistliche Chormusik op. 12. One of the composer’s best-known works, the Totentanz op. 12 no. 2, stands at the heart of this disc.

The fourteen motets for Eternity Sunday contained in the Totentanz op. 12 no. 2 were set to music by Hugo Distler and form the work’s musical part. Distler accompanies the motets with non-musical verses that narrate a dialogue between death and his numerous victims. While on the present recording some of the victims’ roles are spoken by the singers themselves, Heinz-Martin Benecke lends death his charismatic voice.

The Totentanztopos is known especially through its pictorial representations of death’s hold on human life thatwere popular during the fourteenth century. The LübeckTotentanz, for example, depicts clerics and lay people, from the Pope to an innocent child, in descending hierarchical order and separatesthem from each other by a dancing image of death clothed with a shroud. Its central message is: everyone, be he emperor or slave, will perish.