Month: April 2015

Red Priest albums are always stylish, entertaining and controversial, and this one is no exception. It took me a little while to become accustomed to the sound world of Red Priest – recorder, violin, cello and harpsichord – as applied to Handel’s Messiah but I found I soon entered into it and really enjoyed their imaginative interpretations of such well-known music.

It is hard to believe that this sparkling recital was originally issued in 1993; the repertoire it explores, that of 17th-century Spanish secular music, remains relatively little known. Much of the vocal half of the disc is devoted to the theatre music of Juan Hidalgo, who was closely associated with the great dramatist Calderon.

This is the first recording of the six recorder sonatas by Schultzen which were published by Roger in Amsterdam and survive in a copy in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Although they appear in Roger’s 1737 catalogue they are known to have existed as early as 1704 and the identity of A. H. Schultzen, the composer named on the print, is somewhat mysterious.

The three sets of partbooks which were copied for Duke Giovanni Angelo Altaemps in the early 17th century constitute the most significant set of sources for early Baroque Roman music, both polychoral and small-scale concertato.

EMR will readers will surely be able call to mind Quantz’s advocacy of the quartet and his admiration for Telemann’s works in the genre. Well, here’s music that seriously rivals GPT and that’s a clause I never thought I’d type.