REVIEWS: LEIPZIG AFTER BACH: CHURCH AND CONCERT LIFE IN A GERMAN CITY Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018 pp. xix + 313, isbn 978 0 190 61695 3

CHURCH AND CONCERT LIFE IN A GERMAN CITY Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018 pp. xix + 313, isbn 978 0 190 61695 3 The rise of urban public concert life in the eighteenth century remains a touchstone of music-historical enquiry, and many accounts continue to rely, implicitly and explicitly, on the related decline of church musical life as an explanation. The Introduction sets Leipzig apart from other urban music centres – there was both a demand for musical entertainment from the city's trade fairs and a lack of patronage to support any public concert venue until the opening of the Gewandhaus in 1781. Through an examination of recently discovered documents such as text booklets from church services, Sposato shows that ‘a distinct shift in service music priorities took place in the 1730s that led to a newfound interest in cultivating Latin mass settings that slowly grew over the course of the mid-eighteenth century’ (97). Another innovation was distributing movements of large sacred works across several weeks of service (sometimes across several churches) to entice the congregation to return. [...]in a remarkable development, and one which comes through only subtly in this narrative, some new liturgical repertoire performed under Schicht also aligned with works recently published for the musical market (226).