Categories
Recording

Graupner: Gott der Herr ist Sonne und Schild

Epiphanias-Kantaten
Andrea Lauren Brown, Kai Wessel, Georg Poplutz, Dominik Wörner SATB, Kirchheimer BachConsort, Sirkka-Liisa Kaakinen-Pilch
92:28 (2 CDs in a single jewel case)
cpo 555 146-2

[dropcap]S[/dropcap]o many cantatas by composers other than Bach are rarely (if ever) performed, let alone recorded, simply because they were not written for either Christmas or Easter. One notable exception was a cpo recording featuring Ludger Rémy. While those were all from the same year (and thus formed a sensible unit), this new recording of five cantatas for Epiphany (otherwise known as the feast of the three kings) selects works from the latter part of Graupner’s working life at the court of Darmstadt. The number of Sundays after Epiphany varies each year because of the alignment of more significant church festivals with the actual calendar. Here, there is one cantata for the feast itself as well as the 2nd and 4th Sundays thereafter, and two for the 3rd Sunday (the GWV numbering system is slightly odd: 1111 is the code for any cantata text written for Epiphany and the two numbers after the slash are the year in which it was composed). The booklet notes explain that these particular cantatas have been chosen because of their colourful instrumentation; Graupner had always been interested in a rich sound palette; here the flauto d’amore, oboe d’amore, chalumeau, viola d’amore and a pair of horns all feature. I have published a lot of Graupner’s music and I am still amazed how much better it sounds than it looks – personally, I would have preferred a programme of his settings for Epiphany itself from his appointment as Kapellmeister until he stopped composing, which might have shown how his style developed and changed over time. That is not to criticise these performances, which are excellent; if Graupner’s recitatives would not be out of place in the Hamburg operas which had brought him to the Landgrave’s attention in the first place, seemingly inappropriate dance elements pervade the arias and chorales, yet I think the latter are actually his most original compositions – each choral phrase is framed and decorated by instruments, much in the way a baroque organist may have done. Maybe we can have a follow-up recording by these marvellous musicians of cantatas for Trinity Sunday, from key points in Graupner’s career?

Brian Clark

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Categories
Recording

In dulci jubilo

Music for the Christmas season by Buxtehude and friends
Theatre of Voices, Paul Hillier
77:43
DACAPO 6.220661

[dropcap]I[/dropcap] am surprised that I have not encountered a programme like this before; it narrates the Christmas story using musical settings of familiar texts by Buxtehude and other north-German composers. For me personally, the inclusion of two pieces by Christian Geist is a bonus. As well as the opening Praeludium  by Scheidemann, each of the four sections of the story ends with organ music, finely played on both chamber and church organs by the inimitable Allan Rasmussen. The vocal repertoire ranges from solo voice with strings (Geist, Tunder and Weckmann) to Johann Christoph Bach’s eight-part motet, Merk auf, mein Herz. Throughout the singing and playing is beautiful, nicely paced, and impeccably captured in a bright acoustic. This is not the first time this repertoire has been recorded, but having a story-telling structure is a novel approach, and this could be the ideal soundtrack to last-minute present wrapping! I know I have enjoyed it.

Brian Clark

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Categories
Recording

Bach: Goldberg Variations

SELDOM SENE Recorder Quintet
75:00
Brilliant Classics 95591

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his CD arrived in Huntingdon when I was working at Clifford Bartlett’s house. Clifford has been suffering from Alzheimer’s for a couple of years now and, although he still enjoys sitting at his organ sight-reading music, his enjoyment of music has become more restricted; he tends to listen by choice to Vaughan Williams symphonies, resents the fact that BBC Radio 3 play Bach every morning as he is about to get up, and anything unfamiliar is considered “silly”. One thing is not changed: his absolute aversion to recorders! So, when he went to throw this in the bin (!), I decided to rescue it and dupe him into listening to it during one of our many daily car journeys. Suffice to say that the five ladies of Seldom Sene – as I had imagined – overcame his prejudice (both against Bach and the recorder) with their stylish arrangements of this most re-scored piece from the BWV, not to mention their breath-taking performances on no fewer than 21 instruments (right down to one they had CrowdFunded). There is something about involving human breath in the performance of such music that shapes and informs the lines in a way that keyboard instruments and even stringed arrangements would do well to emulate. This is a superb disc that I have often listened to, and I heartily recommend it to anyone who is a fan (or, indeed, not a fan!) of recorders or the Goldbergs.

Brian Clark

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Categories
Recording

Dall’Oglio: Violin Sonatas

Maria Krestinskaya violin, Grigory Krotenko bassetto, Imbi Tarum harpsichord/organ
63:14
Panclassics PC 10378

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he set of sonatas by Dall’Oglio from which the five pieces on this excellent CD come was published in Paris in 1738, some three years after the composer had settled in St Petersburg; they are, in fact, dedicated to a Russian field marshal, who was very much a court insider. The first two pieces have four movements, while the next two have only three (each with a slow opening movement and two livelier ones to follow); then comes sonata XII which begins with a Grave-Allegro pairing, then a theme and variations. While the sonatas are very much Italian in concept, Maria Krestinskaya is quite right in drawing attention in her notes to a definite Russian flavour to some of the music. She draws some beautiful sounds from her Maggini (especially in some excursions to the very upper limits of its fingerboard), and she is nicely partnered by Grigory Krotenko on a bassetto (a photograph of his instrument – also a Maggini, which has survived in Russia – would have been nice!) which Dall’Oglio’s younger brother is known to have played, and Imbi Tarum on harpsichord and organ. Apart from featuring these fine, stylish performances, this disc also shines some light into the obscurity of music at the St Petersburg court; let’s hope that Kretinskaya goes on to record some of Dall’Oglio’s symphonies and concertos, and continues to seek out lost repertoire from Baroque Russia.

Brian Clark

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Categories
Recording

Rosetti: Symfonie

Vitae Pomeranorum – Zaginiony Świat Muzyki Pomorskiej, Volumen 1
The FAMD.PL Orchestra, dir. Paweł Osuchowski
60:55
Recart 0014

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he English version of the Polish in the heading is “The lost world of Pomeranian music”; Pomerania – in its send of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern across the north of Germany and Poland (to save you a trip to google.com!) – was apparently a hotbed of creativity. Anton Rösler was, in fact, born in Bohemia (like so many 18th-century composers) and is generally just one of many names that gets bandied about in discussions of the classical symphony. These lively and stylish performances of three four-movement pieces reveal a composer worthy of far more than a footnote! Particularly the symphony in G minor should be in every chamber orchestra’s repertory – the “hints of Mozart” highlighted in the booklet notes (printed on a large fold-out sheet) are extremely pronounced. What I especially enjoyed about the renditions was their honesty; the horns are rustic and (frankly) raucous at points, but what point do the players have? That is the very nature of their instrument, and it gives a truer account of the sound world inhabited by the composer. Rosetti died the year after Mozart and was only six years older than him, so his was another life cut too short. I have enjoyed listening to this disc many times over the past few weeks and shall definitely return to them when I am in need of uplifting.

Brian Clark

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Categories
Recording

Vivaldi: The Concertos for Recorder

Stefan Temmingh recorders, Capricornus Consort Basel
68:40
Accent ACC 24332

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hen I first listened to this disc, I thought the record company had packaged the wrong ones into the sleeves; “no way this can be Vivaldi!” I thought… and I was correct. Had I read the cover correctly, though, I would have seen that, in addition to the “five and a half” authentic recorder concertos from the quill of the Red Priest, Temmingh and Capricornus Consort Basel give us preludes by his great admirer, J. S. Bach. Having spent a few weeks trying to get my head around the logic of such an arrangement, I have just read Temmingh’s booklet notes and find myself utterly convinced by his argument that, in order to admire properly the exuberance of the concerti, one’s brain first needs “cleansing” – the Bach (albeit instrumental arrangements) preludes act as the sorbet between courses. I was not persuaded by two of them (a pairing of psaltery and lute for one, harpsichord and organ for the other), and feel that another would have been better if the chorale melody had been taken by a wind instrument (although I expect it would have been less cleansing if Temmingh had played it on a large recorder…) The Vivaldi itself is fabulous, impressive without being showy, nicely paced and ornamented. Again, it was with the scoring I had problems; suggesting that the use of bass clef in violin parts when they play bassetto justifies using a continuo instrument for those parts (let alone that being a harp!) strikes me as silly – did Vivaldi’s harpist have a part showing the bassline and the bassetto? Has such a thing ever been seen? Still, I don’t want to end what is a very positive review of a wonderful recording on a negative aspect, which is more about my taste than the performances themselves which are first rate.

Brian Clark

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Categories
Concert-Live performance

Lully: Alceste

Les Talens Lyriques, Versailles, 12 December 2017

Christophe Rousset, director of Les Talens Lyriques

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]lthough the beautifully restored theatre in the palace of Versailles dates from a century after Lully’s day, it obviously makes for an appropriate venue for his operas. Indeed in the case of Alceste  it did have a contemporary performance at Versailles, some six months after its premiere at the Paris Opéra in January 1674. That occasion marked part of the celebrations following the victory over Franche-Comté, when in July Alceste  was given an open-air performance in the Cour de Marbre.

The concert performance given on 12 December was a continuation of Christophe Rousset’s peerless cycle of Lully’s operas, having been first given at the Beaune Festival in the summer. It also appeared on CD contemporaneously with the Versailles performance. Alceste was the second of Lully’s thirteen tragédies en musique. Like nearly all of them it has a libretto by Philippe Quinault based on the work of a classical author, in this case, Euripides’ Alcestis. To the considerable annoyance of the classicists of his day, Quinault took considerable liberties with the story of Alceste’s self-sacrifice to save her husband King Admetus (Admète) from death, in particular introducing a love triangle by making the hero Hercules (Alcide) a rival for the attentions of the queen. Worse still from the point of view of the purists, Quinault introduced a secondary and largely comic trio in the shape of the confidant(e)s Céphise, Lychas and Stratton. Today we are more likely to welcome the variation such mixed genres provide, but it is interesting that Lully and Quinault would quickly lead the way in dropping comic scenes, thus presaging a similar move by Italian opera by some two decades. Quinault’s libretto is indeed notable for its diversity, containing as it does a Prologue set on the banks of the Seine, a seaport and a sinking ship (act 1), dramatic battle scenes that inspired Lully to colourful pomp and brilliant orchestral effects (act 2), the darkness of the funeral obsequies for first Admetus, and later Alceste (act 3), Hercules’ journey to Hades to redeem Alceste, complete with a comic Charon, who worries that the massive hero will sink his boat (act 4), and a final act in which Admetus is initially overcome with joy by the return to life of Alceste, then distraught that he has lost her to Hercules, to whom he promised Alceste should the hero bring her back from Hades. Ultimately all is of course resolved by Hercules nobly returning her to her husband.

Lully sets all this in the flexible alternation between the récitative  he had evolved from the declamation he had studied in the theatre with the airs derived from the airs de cour  of the earlier part of the century. Completing the picture is of course dance, the divertissements  that concluded each act. If later tragédies en musique  are marked by greater maturity and development of the genre, the score of Alceste  is remarkable for its assurance and a use of the orchestra unrivalled by any other composer of the day. The playful character of the love games of the young Céphise with her suitors, contrasts strongly with the moving gravity of the mourning for both king and queen; it is a mark of the flexibility Quinault brought to his book that the flirtatious Céphise plays a deeply touching role in the lamentations for Alceste.

Rousset’s performance maintained the extraordinarily high quality of his previous Lully opera readings. Indeed, given that he here had a cast as near flawless as one has a right to expect the impact created will remain long in the mind. The revelation of the evening for me was mezzo Ambroisine Bré’s Céphise, pertly coquettish, yet also capable of deeper emotional responses. This is a lovely voice, fresh and evenly produced across its range, while also highly accomplished in the execution of ornamentation. Bass Edwin Crossley-Mercer, a Roussset stalwart was a rich-toned and authoritative Alcide, a figure of considerably greater sensitivity than the usual portrayals of Hercules as a rather dense strongman. As his rival, the haute contre  Emiliano Gonzalez Toro was a dignified Admeto, infinitely touching in his farewell scene with Alceste, deeply impressive in the king’s conflicting emotions at the start of act 5. Judith Van Wanroij’s Alceste was marked by a touching, empathetic warmth that extended to real understanding not only for her husband, but also Alcide, the other man who would give her his love. The many remaining parts were divided between five singers, each admirable, of whom Spanish soprano Lucia Martín Cartón and bass Douglas Williams particularly impressed, the latter as Lycomède, the warlike villain of the piece, and Charon. The Namur Chamber Choir have become the ‘go-to’ chorus for large chunks of the Baroque repertoire, their alert response and excellent characterisation here typical of their stellar work. Les Talens Lyriques responded with the finesse and fervour they invariably bring to their playing under their founder, who is now unshakably established as the outstanding Lully interpreter of our (and probably any) day.

Brian Robins

Categories
Recording

Fiorè: Complete cello sonatas & 17th century Italian arias

Elinor Frey cello, Suzie LeBlanc soprano, Lorenzo Ghielmi harpsichord, Esteban La Rotta theorbo
74:38
passacaille 1026

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]s well as presenting Angela Maria Fiorè (1660-1723)’s output for cello, this disc introduces a fairly recently discovered repertoire of opera arias featuring solo cello by such composers as Pollarolo and Marc’Antonio Ziani, in addition to less well-known names like Monza, Sabadini, Magni and Ballarotti. Beautifully recorded with a total of just four musicians, the programme is balanced between instrumental and vocal pieces, and shows not only that there is no need for a stringed bass for such repertoire, and how, even at this early stage in its development, late-17th-century Italian cellists (and composers) already recognised the exceptional singing quality of the instrument. Frey and LeBlanc display both warm lyricism and agile virtuosity – neither the arias nor the sonatas are lacking in technical demand. Ghielmi and La Rotta’s continuo realisations are richly inventive; I especially enjoyed the simple sounds of cello and theorbo alone, the elegantly shaped bowed lines contrasting with the gently pointed bass notes and occasional flourished chord – simply exquisite. Full marks then for discovery and execution!

Brian Clark

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Categories
Recording

J. C. Bach: Six Quartettos Opus 8 for Carl Friedrich Abel

Go Arai oboe, Daniel Deuter violin, Thomas Fritzsch viola da gamba, Inka Döring cello
75:23
Coviello Classics COV91712

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]lthough there can be little doubt that Bach wrote music for his friend and colleague, Abel, there is no more than circumstantial evidence to suggest that this set of six two-movement quartets was among them – the gamba player “has been able to restructure the former viola part”. Be that as it may, these four performers give very convincing accounts of them, which gave me a new appreciation of Bach’s music; with very few exceptions, any pieces I have ever played have had neither substance nor depth, but there are movements here that reveal a higher level of intensity, a clever ear for counterpoint and a satisfying structural sense. That said, I’m not sure I could listen to the whole disc through many times. The booklet is full of Gainsborough reproductions of the main suspects in the history of the publication, and a new edition of the music is available so anyone inspired can explore it for themselves.

Brian Clark

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Categories
Recording

Biagio Marini: Madrigali et Symfonie, op. II

I Musicali Affetti, RossoPorpora
73:33
Tactus TC 591304

[dropcap]B[/dropcap]iagio Marini’s is one of those names most fans of 17th-century know, but only for a handful of chamber works. This recording of an entire publication (only now possible because the missing continuo part has been reconstructed) is extraordinarily rare, and this all the more welcome. Widely travelled and sought after, Marini’s vocal music (as the brief but informative notes tell us) accounts for by far the majority of his output. His opus II broadly alternates instrumental and vocal pieces. I find his music for more than one melody part vastly superior to that for solo voice or instrument. The duets for tenors stand out on this recording and would have been worthy companions for similar pieces by his boss in Venice, Monteverdi. For the most part, the singing is good to very good, sometimes (Track 7, Perché fuggi na’ salti, or Track 17, Deh non coglier più fiori, for example) much more than that – the soprano’s passaggi  and gorgie  are fabulous (it’s a pity the sleevenotes don’t identify individual singers to allow me to give full credit). The set also includes a DVD which has a short documentary on Marini and the history and contents of the publication with nice literary insight, as well as some musical extracts and demonstrations.

Brian Clark

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