Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy

6 Motets op. 79

The present Six Proverbs for the Church Year were composed between 1843 and 1846 on commission from King Frederick William IV for the Berlin Cathedral Choir. Mendelssohn, who had been commissioned by the king in 1842 to reorganize the cathedral choir, nevertheless recognized the opportunity to create a new form of sacred music in the setting of the so-called Proverbs - short liturgical texts after the epistle. He chose an eight-part a cappella instrumentation and based his style on the vocal polyphony of the Renaissance, in particular Palestrina's compositional style. In this edition, the six proverbs follow the liturgical cycle of the year - beginning with Advent, followed by Christmas, New Year, Passiontide, Good Friday and Ascension Day. This SAM-Klang edition offers a tonally balanced version for four-part choir (three female voices, one male voice) and thus also enables smaller ensembles to perform these musically and theologically valuable works.

The SAM-Klang series offers a basic repertoire for choirs with soprano, alto and one male voice. In addition to new repertoire and new arrangements, you will also find essential parts of the classic German, Scandinavian, French and English SATB repertoire, carefully and considerately reworked for SAM. The arrangements retain the characteristic features of the original movements and have almost the same fullness of sound, so that the works sound almost as familiar to the audience. The arrangements offer development opportunities for all voice groups and bring new life and quality to the SAM choir work. Piano reductions of all choral movements facilitate rehearsal preparation. SAM- Klang thus enables youth choirs, among others, to enter the classical choral literature and also ensures that mixed choirs with smaller instrumentation continue to have access to the well-tried and appreciated repertoire. New releases and the existing repertoire,