Amazon.comThis recording will be a happy revelation to most listeners. Due to the overshadowing figure of J.S. Bach, much music and many composers from 18th-century Germany never reach the light of concert programs or recordings. On evidence of the five church cantatas and one motet featured here, Johann Kuhnau was a highly accomplished, versatile, and sufficiently inventive composer--a description entirely at odds with his reputation as a dull, conservative functionary. Of course, this isn't Bach, and there are many sections of these works that are merely interesting and competent. But then we hear something like the beautiful countertenor aria in the cantata "O heilige Zeit," and we find ourselves in the vicinity if not the immediate presence of Bach himself. This is wonderful stuff, and The King's Consort leaves us not only impressed and uplifted but with a new respect for this unjustly neglected composer. --David Vernier