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Sheet music

English Keyboard Music c.1600-1625

  • Keyboard Solos and Duets by Nicholas Carleton, John Amner and John Tomkins: six pieces from Volume XCVI of Musica Britannica, edited by Alan Brown.
    Stainer & Bell (K48), 2015. £8.75, 32pp
  • Jacobean Keyboard Music: An Anthology, selected from Volume XCVI of Musica Britannica, edited by Alan Brown.
    Stainer & Bell (K49), 2015. £8.75, 32pp.

[dropcap]M[/dropcap]usica Britannica 96 contains 77 items with a few extras: the two short volumes contain six and 17 items at good value. Each book has a page of comments. Keyboard Solos and Duets begins with a short Prelude  (supplemented by an editorial upper part, though with space and barring enough to make it clear that it was intended to be for two players) and A Verse  [In nomine] for two to play by Nicholas Carleton. This is certainly a vast improvement (without the Prelude) on what I knew from a 1949 Schott edition! The pages can be turned by the higher part. There are two other single-player pieces: A verse of four parts  is densely polyphonic, but also has manageable page-turns; Upon the sharp is in three parts, with not one but all five sharps! John Amner’s O Lord, in thee is all my trust  is a metrical setting of Psalm 31 in 88.88.88 meter and eight verses. The first three have two dotted semibreves, then the other five split the bars to make reading easier. There are evidently breaks between verses, though it is odd that the end of verse one has a single minim: since there is a pause, it seems superfluous to worry about dotting it. I’m not sure whether it is too lengthy. I played it through in my library: there’s enough variety for domestic playing without too much concern with registration, though a larger church organ could be more expressive. It has 218 bars, but verses 1-2, 3-4 & 5-6 can be treated independently. John Tomkins, younger half-brother of Thomas, wrote the only secular item here: John come kiss me now. He imitates Byrd by also having 16 variations of eight bars. I wonder, though, if one of the volumes could have been more plausibly suitable for organ.

The second book is most likely to be aimed at virginals, etc., though there are several items that could have been swapped with the first book – the Carlton duet in particular, but also the perhaps Upon the sharp  on the grounds that modulating the black notes can be adjusted far more easily on strings. I won’t go through the items, though it is interesting to compare the Fortune my foe  by Byrd and Tomkins with the anonymous setting here. The final item is the anon Pretty ways for young beginners to look on  with 16 short (to start with five) bars until no. 9. The bass is, adjusting for the mensuration, identical throughout. Try until you understand them mentally and on the keys.

Clifford Bartlett

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Sheet music

Handel: Agrippina… HWV6

Piano reduction… based on the Urtext of the Halle Handel Edition by Andreas Köhs.
Bärenreiter (BA 4092-90) £40.00, xix + 350pp.

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]grippina is an amazing opera. Think of Monteverdi’s L’incoronatione di Poppea. The title refers to the leading lady – Nerone is perhaps a minor character. Agrippina is the most powerful figure in Handel’s opera, followed by the younger Poppea. All the male characters are scorned! I’m an enthusiast for the work itself. It isn’t a serious opera at all. I’ve commented on it in various reviews, and it is becoming popular. Surtitles are essential unless it is translated into English… or German or whatever!

A major problem with the Bärenreiter vocal score is its weight. If singers are trying to learn their parts, they will find it heavy to hold. If you place it on a music stand, there are problems in taking the weight or keeping the pages open. It is ludicrous for singers learning the secco recitatives  to have the same chords every time – much more sensible to have the bass figured. There’s no need for the additional material (from p.293-350): those who are interested can get them from the score. However, HHA makes no attempt to make the editions accessible. The scores are expensive, but could easily be passed on to Bärenreiter to produce in something like A4 and sold comparatively cheaply – probably at the price of the vocal score! A further consideration is that my score (A4 format) weights 640g with a price of £30.00: the Bärenreiter vocal score weighs 980g. We don’t bother with vocal scores, but do produce parts. Vocal scores are required for oratorios, but not for operas.

There’s no point in evaluating the work itself when the new score isn’t available. It takes about an hour and a half each way to get to the Cambridge University Music Library – but having been a librarian for several decades, I don’t read in libraries but do have a substantial library at home! I have a variety of microfilms, but I’d only spend time on a full score. Incidentally, the concept of a vocal score didn’t exist in Handel’s time! And, why does HHA insist on printing oboe parts when most of the time all that is needed is cuing the violins, especially since it isn’t clear when both oboes double the violin I or divide between I & II. But I’ve wandered off… Why is HHA so falsely pedantic, and why can’t we get score copies for review?

Clifford Bartlett

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Recording

Vivaldi: Sacred Music 4

Claire de Sévigné soprano, Maria Soulis mezzo-soprano, Aradia Ensemble, Kevin Mallon
59:48
Naxos 8.573324
RV604, 606, 607, 627, 628, 631, 633

My first reaction to this CD was one of surprise. In a world packed with unperformed Baroque music, it is surprising to come across what I assume is yet another complete account of the sacred music of Antonio Vivaldi. So what do these Canadian performers bring to Vivaldi’s music which would necessitate another complete account of his church music? Well this CD is a testimony to the healthy state of period playing and singing in Canada. Claire de Sévigné’s singing in In turbato mare irato  is spectacular – effortlessly virtuosic throughout the wide range it demands and beautifully sweet-toned. Her fellow soloist Maria Soulis has a fine warm mezzo-soprano voice, which has uncanny elements of the male alto about it. The playing and singing of the Aradia Ensemble, which turns out to embody a chorus as well as a string orchestra, is concise and delicate and under the direction of Kevin Mallon the performers demonstrate a profound understanding of Vivaldi’s oeuvre. The fact is that these performances are very persuasive indeed, and if somebody is to commit the complete sacred Vivaldi to disc, these are probably the best people to choose. For Vivaldi fans these are crisp fresh accounts of familiar repertoire, for those unfamiliar with Vivaldi’s vast sacred output other than the ubiquitous Gloria  there are many delights in store, while for the parsimonious a new complete account of Vivaldi’s sacred music has its own delights. If I am stretched to answer my own original question about what these performances add to the sum of human knowledge about Vivaldi, the high standard of the singing and playing can only delight.

D. James Ross

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Recording

Reicha: Wind Quintets

Thalia Ensemble
67:00
Linn Records CKD471

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he name Antoine Reicha is one which has fairly comprehensively slipped between the floorboards of musical history, except for within one select circle of musicians, wind players. With them Reicha’s wind music, and in particular his wind quintets, has remained current and provides a useful and engaging programme filler. The present CD, part of the Thalia Ensemble’s prize for winning the 2013 York Early Music International Young Artists’ Competition, brings us two wind quintets and an Adagio for wind quartet and obligato cor anglais all played on period instruments of the early 19th century. This final detail may seem relatively unimportant in these days of the ubiquity of period performances, but in this case it was a major factor in my enjoyment of the CD. While tuneful and accessible, Reicha’s music is occasionally accused of blandness, but when the Thalia Ensemble moved into the more chromatic passages of these works the remarkable range of characteristics occasioned by fork fingerings and lippings up and down imbued the music with considerable individuality. Occasionally the tuning is a little bit uncomfortable, but as this is the direct result of playing the instruments Reicha knew and was writing for we can assume that these sour moments were part of his original intentions.

Perhaps any ‘blandness’ in performances of Reicha’s music nowadays should be put down to the regularising effect of modern woodwind instruments rather than any lack of imagination on the part of the composer. This tonal variety is further enhanced by the use of clarinets in C, Bb and A, standard practice at the time, but an issue which modern players tend to gloss over. Although details of the instruments the players use is sparse, I am guessing that Diederik Orné is using the bright C clarinet in the opening quintet and the mellower Bb in the second – the difference in tonal character is certainly considerable. And by the 1820s the mechanism of the Müller system clarinet was relatively advanced allowing for much improved intonation. As a flute player himself, Reicha writes beautifully for the flute, but what is perhaps most striking is his mastery of the wind quintet as an entity – perhaps not since Mozart and not until Nielsen did anyone write such accomplished chamber music for winds.

D. James Ross

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Recording

Handel: Duetti e Terzetti italiani

Roberta Invernizzi, Silvia Frigato, Krystian Adam, Thomas Bauer SSTBar, La Risonanza, Fabio Bonizzoni dir
61:44
Glossa GCD 921517

[dropcap]R[/dropcap]ecent years have produced no greater aural pleasure than La Risonanza’s on-going series of Handel’s vocal chamber works. Here they turn their attention to one of the most neglected genres in his output, the vocal duets and trios with continuo accompaniment. Checking back, I was amazed to find that it is now 30 years since the delightful Hungarian soprano Mária Zádori and alto Paul Esswood produced a splendid two-CD set including eleven duets. Since that was for a different vocal disposition, there are no duplications with the new disc, the contents of which are two trios and nine duets composed during or (in one case) possibly just before Handel’s Italian sojourn (1707-1709).

At the time Handel visited Italy the vocal duet was popular as a sophisticated chamber form cultivated by composers such as Steffani. I find several aspects of the youthful Handel’s contribution to it quite remarkable, perhaps above all in his realisation of dramatic possibilities not necessarily inherent in texts largely concerned with the vagaries of love. He achieves this by adopting a flexible approach quite different from the formalism of the chamber cantatas. There are no da capo  arias, the text being treated in sections in ways that seem to take their cue from the words. Take, for example, ‘Va, speme infida’ (HWV 199) (Go, treacherous hope, be off), for two sopranos. It opens, as suggested by the text, driven by a strong running bass and rapid imitative passaggi  between the voices. ‘Tu baldanzosa’ (You told my heart in a conceited manner) brings a new idea, with a slower dotted rhythm, still with much imitative passaggi  but now also introducing lovely floated cantabile writing. At the word ‘Ma’ (but) that starts line 4, the pause after it brings a striking moment of rhetoric, before continuing the fervid sentiment (‘if having been a liar to no avail’) in more declamatory, increasingly accusatory mode before almost imperceptibly text and music slip back to the opening to create a satisfying and thoroughly logical cyclical form. The whole effect is both musically and dramatically masterful. I’ve chosen to discuss this one duet in detail as an illustration of Handel’s extraordinarily confident handling of the form, but most of the others could be discussed in similar fashion. The pair of trios add not only an extra voice, but also an extra dimension, demonstrating the composer’s mastery of counterpoint in writing of madrigalian complexity and sensitivity. ‘Se tu non lasci amore’ (HWV 201) (Too well do I know that if you do not give up love), for which we have a rare specific date and place of composition (Naples, 12 July 1708), is scored for two sopranos and bass, the contrast of vocal gamut skilfully exploited in intricately interwoven lines. The text, which speaks of the anguish of the separated lover, lends itself to writing that involves such an unusually high degree of chromaticism and dissonant suspensions that it inspires the note writer to the unlikely theory that it was composed in homage to Gesualdo, himself of course Neapolitan.

As might have been predicted, the performances are very much a match for the interest and high quality of the music. Roberta Invernizzi has been one of the mainstays of the series, but her customary musical insight and gloriously free tone is here matched keenly by Silvia Frigato and Thomas Bauer, their performance of the bewitching ‘Tacete, ohimè, tacete! (HWV 196) (Cease, oh, be still), a plea not to disturb the sleeping Amor, bringing some exquisite mezza voce  singing and forming one of the highlights of the CD. The excellent tenor Krystian Adam gets only one duet with Invernizzi, ‘Caro autor di mio doglia’ ((HWV 182) (Dearest author of my pain), but that too is exceptional, the one unadulterated love duet. Again the structure is interesting, with a high point of ecstatic fervour at the declamation ‘O lumi! O volto! O luci! O labbro! (O enlightenment! O countenance! O eyes! O lips!). It will come as no surprise to those who’ve followed the series to learn that Bonizzoni’s support is as unobtrusively musical as ever. If that sounds like faint praise, it is not meant to be; his refusal to strive for superfluous effect is one of his greatest assets, not to mention a rare one. Reservations? Very few, but critical duty demands mention of Invernizzi’s tendency to sing too loudly in her upper register, and I felt the singers were a little parsimonious with ornamentation. But that is Beckmesser-ish carping in the context of what is unquestionably one of the best discs of 2015. A joy of a CD!

Brian Robins

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Recording

The church music of John Sheppard: The collected vernacular works – volume II

Academia Musica Choir, conducted by Aryan O. Arji
77:02
Priory PRCD 1108

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he Latin church music of Sheppard, who died late in 1558, is finally beginning to receive the recognition it deserves. It suffered a setback nearly a hundred years ago when the Wall Street Crash put paid to a second series of Tudor Church Music  in which Sheppard’s music was going to feature, but a revival begun during the latter half of the twentieth century led to the publication of three volumes containing his Latin music in the series Early English Church Music, well before the notional quincentenary of his birth in 2015. Alongside this slow-burning but effective revival of his music for the Roman Catholic Church there has been parallel interest in his smaller Anglican oeuvre, leading to volume I of a pair of discs being released in 2013, with this volume II coming along just in time for the quincentenary.

The Academia Musica Choir is an interesting ensemble, being a combination of choral scholars and musicians in residence at Hereford Sixth Form College. Although this is a mixed choir, with young sopranos on the top line and a combination of males and females making up the altos, they have a sound not unlike a traditional male cathedral choir, and this is probably due to their age range. Volume I (PRCD 1081) included anthems for full choir and for men’s voices, the whole of the First Service, and all of Sheppard’s minute surviving repertory of music composed (or possibly arranged by contemporaries) for keyboard. This remains a disc to savour. Volume II contains more anthems, some carols, a reconstructed Evening Service, and the whole of the mighty and influential Second Service – another feast of music.

As early as the 1590s John Baldwin had noted that at least one passage in Byrd’s Great Service owed something to the setting of the same text in Sheppard’s Second Service. Roger Bray developed this line of thought in some sleevenotes about the evening canticles in 1996, and the following year, in an article published in Musical Times, I compared both Services in their entireties, noting Byrd’s structural and melodic debts to Sheppard – not that one would realise this from listening to Byrd’s Great Service, which is typically a work of relentless creativity and supreme confidence. Thanks to the performance on this disc, Sheppard’s Second Service emerges as a worthy inspiration and model for Byrd’s transcendent masterpiece. The seven movements, including the shortest – the Kyrie – supplied by the obscure John Brimley in the presumable absence of Sheppard’s original, are impressive as an entity, while the individual movements are just as impressive as separate pieces. Interestingly the uncredited writer of the sleevenotes seems more taken with the Evening Service for Trebles, which has been reconstructed by David Wulstan from the organ score, but for all that the writer feels that what we have of the Second Service is possibly an unpolished draft, to this reviewer it is the Second Service rather than the admittedly fine Evening Service for Trebles which is Sheppard’s Anglican masterpiece. Although necessarily not as expansive as much of his Latin music, there are still many moments of what we have come to expect of Sheppard: a case in point is the remarkable harmonic change in the Venite at the words “Forty years long”. The anthems and carols provide thinner gruel, again by liturgical and theological necessity, but I give you a new commandment  is one of the finest of all Tudor anthems.

The Academia Musica Choir gives a good account of this music. The singing is not perfect – there is for instance a particularly adolescent tenor entry in the Magnificat at the words “in God my saviour” – but it manages to be idiomatic, and this edginess combined with the accommodating acoustic of Gloucester Cathedral enables one to feel like being as close as possible to a real service without actually being present.

The sleevenotes are a major work of scholarship, and were in fact written by the editor of most of the music, Stefan Scot, who has also edited all of Sheppard’s Anglican music for a forthcoming volume in the series Early English Church Music. Stefan was responsible for discovering that the Creed from Sheppard’s First Service, on volume I, is virtually identical to the Creed in Tallis’s Mass for Four Voices; and on this recording he has included a carol with an attribution to Merbecke which he has discovered bears many hallmarks of other works by Sheppard. The project is fortunate to have the cooperation of this leading Sheppard scholar, and it is a mystery as to why his notes and editions are not credited – especially as he is ethical enough to credit Wulstan with editing the Evening Service for Trebles. Incidentally the organist who plays Sheppard’s few surviving keyboard pieces on volume I is also uncredited. For the record [sic] he is Michael Blake.
Everyone with any sort of interest in, or penchant for, or even taking a punt on, Sheppard should purchase this disc, at the least for the premiere of the complete Second Service. Although the recordings of its two evening canticles – by Christ Church Cathedral and The Sixteen – are tidier, they do not convey the sprawling magnificence of these movements. Indeed the only recording which is incontrovertibly preferable to one on this CD is Stile Antico’s version of I give you a new commandment  on their disc “Media Vita” (Harmonia Mundi HMU 807509) which is devoted to Sheppard, and which contains some of even their very best singing on record. Obviously all Sheppardista  should own both recordings.

Richard Turbet

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Recording

Vivaldi: Concerti per fagotto IV

Sergio Azzolini, L’Onda Armonica
68:40
naïve OP 30551
Tesori del Piemonte  vol. 59
RV469, 473, 491, 492, 498 & 500

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]hese six bassoon concertos once again contradict the oft-paraphrased oversimplification that the composer wrote “one concerto 600 times”. Framed by works in C major, there are two more in A minor (including my favourite of Vivaldi’s 39 solo concertos for the instrument, RV498) and one each in F and G major. In live performance, I have previously written in these pages, Sergio Azzolini can be rather distracting in his means of communicating with his audience, but through the medium of digital music I am spared that visuals and can luxuriate in the warmth of his tone, especially in the lyrical central movements.

In the faster outer ones, yes, Vivaldi relies on the building blocks of ritornello form, but he had the great advantage over most of his contemporaries of writing really ear-catching melodies in the first place, and when it comes to writing virtuosically for the soloist, he has few – if any – rivals. L’Onda Armonica (44221 strings with plucker – with an array of different instruments at his disposal – and keyboardist) are more than “accompaniment”; just listen to the opening of RV498 (Track 7 – Azzolini imagines it representing a snow-covered Venetian winter!) as a sample of their layered dynamics and careful phrasing. This is a fabulous CD and I shall enjoy returning to it often.

Brian Clark

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Sheet music

Bach: Organ Works Vol. 4, Third Part of the Clavier-Übung

Edited by Manfred Tessmer, updated edition by Christoph Wolff.
Urtext of the New Bach Edition. Bärenreiter (BA 5264), 2015. xvii + 99pp. £18.50.

This is based on Neue Bach-Ausgabe of 1969, Series 4 (organ works), no. 4. The changes are not particularly significant, but there are various improvements or changes. The comparison is with Breitkopf, vol. 6 (EB 8806), which contains Clavierübung, the Schübler Chorales and the Canonische Veränderungen; the edition was published in 2010, so the differences between the two editions are likely to be few. EB has 156 pages including 16 pages of editorial comments priced below £20.00, which is a good value with the other two items.

Bä takes 99 pages of music, with no subsequent editorial commentaries. EB’s introduction is more readable and interesting than Bä. Bä includes eight chorales on two pages with unreduced notes and text. The musical layout is sometimes confusing. The opening Praeludium per Organo pleno  is mostly on two staves; if there is third one, it is sometimes in alto clef. Both editors, however, tend to expand to three lines. The titles are less pedantic here than in the 1969 edition. There is some advantage in the two-stave range, in that there is more flexibility when the division of the middle part may well make readers assume that the modern notation is genuine. The main source was produced by two musical engravers. Sadly, Bach’s manuscript has vanished and editors have no clear choice of correcting between the sources. Luckily the variants are fairly trivial.

Will Bärenreiter follow Breitkopf’s lead and start including additional material in a CD? EB offers far more information but with lower prices.

Clifford Bartlett

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Sheet music

J. S. Bach: Complete Organ Works vol.8: Organ Chorales of the Leipzig Manuscript

Edited by Jean-Claude Zehnder.
Breitkopf & Härtel (EB8808),2015. 183pp + CD containing musical texts, commentary & synoptical depiction. €26.80.

I bought the Bärenreiter equivalent (vol. 2) back in 1961, three years after it was published. Bach evidently was expecting to produce a larger work than the six Organ Sonatas, assembled around 1730; he then waited a decade before moving on around 1740, using the same paper. He copied 15 pieces, then had a break. BWV666 and 667 were not copied by Bach. The Leipzig Manuscript is now in the Berlin library, Mus. Ms Bach P 271.

The two editions lay out the music in different ways. Bärenreiter prints the final versions first, then the earlier ones together at the end; Breitkopf places the early versions immediately after each piece. It might, however, have been logical to place the early version first with the final version following, so that the player might think more seriously about the differences. I wonder the extent to which the later versions are always better, or is it an automatic assumption? Bärenreiter is set out more spaciously with 214pp preceded by xiv prelims which include nine pages of facsimile and no introduction: for that and critical comments, etc., you need to buy the Kritischer Bericht, which is in German only. Breitkopf has a single numbering of 183pp, which is cut down by actual pages of music because of 22 opening pages of introduction in German and English and nine facsimiles, leaving a total number of musical pages to 152 – 32 pages fewer than Bärenreiter. I don’t, however, have any problems in reading the Breitkopf. There is a German critical commentary at the end of the volume, but much more information (also in English) as well as additional versions are on a CD-ROM. One difference is the Bärenreiter begins each of the later versions with the chorale melody and first verse, whose absence is a pity.

I happen to have read Bach’s Numbers  by Ruth Tatlow (see the November review by Brian Clark). I’m generally suspicious of number symbols, and the older concepts have been rejected. What Bach is concerned with is the total length, not so much as individual pieces but groups of pieces (e.g. the first 24 preludes and fugues) and the idea is most lengthily shown in the B-minor Mass. The “18” is a dubious choice because nos. 16-18 were written after the composer’s death. I wonder whether the first piece in the collection, Fantasia super Komm, Heiliger Geist, was expanded from 48 to 105 bars as the quickest way to complete the round number. The total bars of any individual chorale is only relevant to the total, and the only round sum covers BWV 651-665. It does seem an odd concept and I can’t take it seriously – the 1200 bars do not help guess how to fit such a length into CD discs. But that Bach wrote “The 15” rather than “The 18” could, even without a total bar count, suggest that BWV 666-668 should be left as an appendix.

I think I would only buy the Breitkopf if I was a scholar or an enthusiast or if my copy was falling apart. I haven’t played a church organ for about 50 years, so my copy is used primarily for listening to recordings (though I rarely do that now). The price of the Bärenreiter volume, although older, is roughly the same figure but in sterling, so Breitkopf is somewhat better economy.

Clifford Bartlett

Categories
Recording

Praetorius: Christmas Vespers

Apollo’s Fire | The Cleveland Baroque Orchestra, Jeannette Sorrell
74:40
Avie Records AV2306

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his is a bit of a mixture. This “Christmas Vespers” is nothing like the McCreesh “Christmas Mass”, which has been used by performers in various parts of the world. It had the benefit of Robin Leaver as distinguished expert – he and I sat at the back row and heard the recording for the BBC before the CD was issued, but we talked rather too much!* This Apollo’s Fire CD is not one of their best. I won’t go into details, but the singing doesn’t have the clarity one expects from the period (c.1600-1620) and the rallentandos are particularly out of time: I haven’t got my Praetorius writings at hand, since much of my music has gone to a Cambridge library, but my recollection is that there is no change of speed except that the penultimate bar can be slower. I feel that the speed of pieces with high cornetti is just a fraction too quick. The title is misleading: McCreesh produced a full CD of Vespers, but this squashes a Lutheran Advent service and a Vespers for Christmas Day, neither being satisfactory.

Individual pieces don’t always work. One of my favourites is Puer natus: Ein Kind geborn. There are more dynamics needed: think of quiet, medium and loud sections. The Sinfonia should surely stay at the soft level (mp), without stressing each bar in the triple time. The vocal trio and Bc needs a normal sound, but the ritornelli are short and strong. The final section (from “Mein Herzens kindlein”) has full forces but ends quietly – follow the text – and in general, the text needs more variety of the stress of the accents. This sounds as if I’m a modernist, but the tempo is rigid (except as noted above) and it will sound much more Praetorian than anything else on this disc. I’m not convinced that Jeannette Sorrell is adequately aware of early baroque, though she is far better in late baroque. Two specific errors are having a cello (which appeared in the 1640s) and a double bass (which became standard in 1702 in France). The lowest pitch would have been the G or F below the bass sackbut’s B flat.

*The Michael Praetorius Christmas Mass was recorded by The Gabrieli Consort and Players (Archiv 439-250-2). I prepared the musical edition, which is available from The Early Music Company Ltd. The solo organ pieces were contributed by Tim Roberts and are not in the score.

Clifford Bartlett

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