Categories
Recording

Couperin, Rameau [&] de Seixas

Modern floral

Mariko Terashi piano
76:11
athene ath 23207

Of the three composers represented here, Carlos de Seixas is by far the least well known. Working in Portugal in the first half of the 18th century, he had the double misfortune firstly to die young at the age of just 38 and secondly to have most of his music and his instruments destroyed in the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. On the basis of the imaginative and polished sonatas performed here, he is a composer whose reputation is overdue a re-evaluation. Younger than either Couperin or Rameau by some twenty and thirty years respectively, de Seixas was clearly much more open to new keyboard styles, and it is intriguing to think what he might have achieved had his life not been cut short by a fatal attack of rheumatic fever. In addition to four of de Seixas’s Sonatas we have selections from the first and second Livres de Clavecin by Rameau and pieces from various Ordres by Couperin. I have to point out at this stage that Mariko Terashi performs her programme on a modern piano, and that (personally) I like my harpsichord music played on a harpsichord. Even setting that prejudice to one side, I have to say that I find Terashi’s playing a little bland and that her ornaments lack the definition I think is necessary for the music of this period. She also has the annoying mannerism of throwing away final cadences. This is all probably least detrimental in the forward-looking de Seixas pieces, but both the Rameau and the Couperin sound emasculated. I am grateful to this CD for having alerted me to the music of de Seixas, and I must look out for performances on harpsichord.

D. James Ross

Categories
Recording

Michelangelo’s Madrigal

Dark green flowers

Kate Macoboy soprano, Robert Meunier lute
Et’cetera KTC 1623
Music by Cara, dall’Aquila, Dalza, da Milano, Pesenti, Scannazaro, Scotto & Tromboncino

This interesting collection of secular Italian songs of the first half of the 16th century is built around the work of Bartolomeo Tromboncino, and more specifically the madrigal Come harò donque ardire, setting a poem by the legendary artist Michelangelo Buonarroti – the ‘Michelangelo’s Madrigal’ of the title. In addition to several other of Tromboncino’s settings, we have music by Joan Ambrosio Dalza, Marco dall’Aquila, Michele Pesenti, Francesco da Milano, Marchetto Cara and Paulo Scotto. Robert Meunier proves an able accompanist and an accomplished soloist in the works for lute alone, while Kate Macaboy has a pleasant well-focused soprano voice. In keeping with the performance notes, both performers treat the written scores as springboards for their own musical imaginations, decorating both the melody and the accompaniment as the composers surely intended. Macaboy introduces an appropriate level of dramatization into her performances, and this along with the accumulation of ornamentation prevents the often rather simple melodies outliving their welcome. It is hard to reconcile this rather naïve compositional style with the fact that Tromboncino and Michelangelo collaborated while employed together at the Ferrara court of the notorious Lucrezia Borgia. Perhaps an aptitude for on-the-spot elaboration of melodies would have helped cultivate the quick reactions necessary for survival at a Renaissance Italian court!

D. James Ross

Categories
Recording

C. P. E. Bach: Cello Concerti

Pink chrysanthemum

Guy Fishman cello, Members of the Handel and Haydn Society
64:24
Olde Focus Recordings

Probably the most prodigiously talented of the Bach sons, Carl Philipp Emanuel wrote concertos for a large variety of instruments, but his cello concerti are probably the finest of these. It is mainly in the slow movements of the three concerti recorded here by Guy Fishman and his colleagues in the Boston-based Handel and Haydn Society that we find CPE at his most eloquent and profound. Frequent quixotic changes of mood and moments of inspired originality animate the opening movements and also the often sparklingly virtuosic finales. Playing one to a part, the ‘orchestral’ musicians can react quickly and unanimously to the soloist, and these performances are characterised by fleetness of foot and animated interaction between soloist and ensemble. Composed while Bach was employed at the court of Frederick the Great, he clearly had access to some of the finest musicians of the age, and while his duties at court seem to have been underappreciated, with his music sounding rather too musically daring for the conservative Frederick, it did at least leave the composer lots of time to produce a string of masterpieces. The programme comprises the concerti in A major Wq. 172, in A minor Wq. 170 and in B flat major Wq. 171, all beautifully played and for which Fishman invents his own cadenzas as Bach’s cellist would undoubtedly have done – Bach’s own cadenzas, which do survive, were composed for transcriptions of the works for solo harpsichord and chamber ensemble and so are keyboard-specific. Listening to the magnificent B flat concerto with which the CD culminates, it is astonishing to realize how far music has traveled in just one generation.

D. James Ross

Categories
Recording

Bonporti: Sonatas op. 2

Floral design

Labirinti Armonici
58:01
Brilliant Classics 95718

The first nine of the ten trio sonatas that make up Francesco Antonio Bonporti’s op. 2 consist of four dance-based movements, while the final sonata is a Ciaccona in G. Superficially they resemble Corelli’s sonate da camera, but there is a greater degree of contrapuntal complexity (the imitations come thicker and faster, for example) and Bonporti has a wider harmonic palette. Labirinti Armonici opt to perform the sonatas out of order; that of the printed set forms no pattern, so this seems sensible. The playing is generally of a high order – there is an occasional lack of ensemble in some of the quick triplet passages, but the overall effect is of a highly professional group at home with the repertoire. So little of Bonporti’s works have been recorded to the highest standards; let us hope this is a start of a revival!

Brian Clark

Categories
Recording

Corelli: Violin Sonatas op. 5

Floral design

Rémy Baudet violin, Jaap ter Linden cello, Mike Fentross theorbo & guitar, Pieter-Jan Belder harpsichord
119:53 (2 CDs in a single jewel case)
Brilliant Classics 95597

As I have written in these pages so many times in the past, recordings of such important repertoire really need to have something new to say about the music as well as the performers; oftentimes, this results in some hot-shot young fiddler taking the 12 sonatas by the scruff of the neck and decorating the living daylights out of them – the overall effect, of course, is that Corelli is lost in a whirlwind of notes and artificial conceits ranging from subito pianissimo to triple fortissimo just for sheer dramatic effect.

Quite to the contrary, this set (which features two “blasts from the past” in ter Linden and Fentross, a relative newcomer in Belder and – I am ashamed to say! – an unknown violinist in Rémy Baudet) is Corelli as the composer would probably have played it! Baudet has for many years led both modern and period ensembles across Europe as well as playing with the Quartetto Italiano and writing a book about developments in violin technique from 1770-1870. He is also quite the violinist, more than capable of shaping Corelli’s most complex part-writing, weaving the delicate filigree of the ornamentation of the slow movements, and actually dancing the dances. He is, of course, in splendid company, and the whole enterprise is beautifully captured by Brilliant’s engineers.

If – for some strange reason – you don’t already have a set of these pieces, buy this one. Even if you have, buy this one – at Brilliant’s amazingly low prices, this will be something against which to measure your favourite!

Brian Clark

Categories
Uncategorized

The Alehouse Sessions

Barokksolistene, Bjarte Eike
50:42
Rubicon RCD1017

Before I review this CD I have to declare an interest – some of you will have read my ecstatic EMR review from the St Magnus Festival in June of a series of appearances by the Barokksolistene (still available on the EMR website) in which I tried to capture the mixture of amazement and pleasure that I experienced at their live shows. Although it is impossible, I shall have to try to set my experience as an audience member to one side as I review this CD of one of the actual programmes I attended back in June. So how does this recording hold up as a heard experience without all the intriguing stage business, the charismatic presence of Bjarte Eike and the witty and profound theatrical dimension? Is it, as sometimes happens, a case of ‘you had to be there’? Well no. The superb technical prowess of these remarkable musicians, their uncanny sense of ensemble, their unparalleled familiarity with the material all shine through I think in this CD. Some of the eccentricities of presentation which at the live performance we rather took on trust, sound a little more outrageous on CD – Thomas Guthrie’s idiosyncratic vocal style perhaps needs his beguiling physical presence to be entirely convincing, while I was much more aware of the heavy level of arrangement of the source material which had clearly gone on. In some of the music, this involves updating the harmonies in an unsettlingly modern cabaret style, while the edges of the instrumental authenticity are a little blurred by the use of a mixture of Baroque and essentially modern instruments. Some of the musicians unashamedly bring their jazz roots with them onstage, but for me the type of music they are performing lends itself brilliantly to that sort of spontaneous improvisatory approach. At its best, this CD is wonderfully energetic and idiomatic, and even at its most eccentric it is never remotely unmusical or dishonest to its source material. Perhaps most impressive is the way in which the CD, like the show, captures the ambience of a bunch of young men ‘on the lash’ using musical performance to show off to one another, to challenge one another and ultimately to impress us with their innate musicality and technical assurance. Maybe it is after all impossible for me to divorce listening to this CD from the experience of the live Barokksolistene, and maybe the CD will mainly sell as an after-concert souvenir, but actually I would recommend that you buy the CD and then seriously try to catch the group live. You won’t regret either!

D. James Ross

Categories
Recording

Birds

Modern floral

Elina Mustonen harpsichord
68:19
fuga-9447
Byrd, F. Couperin, Rameau + modern composers

As a lover of birds and the harpsichord, this CD could have been fashioned specially for me! Throughout history composers have admired and imitated the songs of birds, and this CD by harpsichordist Elina Mustonen explores the relationship in the keyboard music of the 17th, 18th and 21st centuries. The CD opens with the stunning sounds of nightingale song before Mustonen embarks on the Quatorzième Ordre from Couperin’s Troisième Livre de Clavecin of 1722, in which the composer evokes the songs of various birds, most prominently arguably the most distinguished of avian vocalists, the nightingale. After the Couperin, we are taken through a group of modern pieces for harpsichord by Peter Machajdík and Oli Mustonen with bird connections before the programme concludes with some slightly tangential Byrd and some much more on-message Rameau. Elina Mustonen entitles her programme notes A Bird Fancyer’s Delight and it is perhaps a pity that she didn’t arrange some of the melodies from that famous 17th-century English publication rather than shoe-horn in the Byrd (what’s in a name?) and the modern works, which are a bit of a culture shock. The sound of Mustonen’s 1993 Kroesbergen Couchet copy harpsichord is superbly rich and vividly captured by her sound engineers. All in all, I felt that this programme was an intriguing idea, best at its beginning and end, seeming slightly to lose its way in the middle, although the quality of the music and the playing are never less than excellent.

D. James Ross

Categories
Recording

Splendor da ciel

Dark green flowers

Rediscovered Music from a Florentine Trecento Manuscript
La Morra
63:41
Ramée RAM 1803

This CD is subtitled ‘rediscovered music from a Florentine Trecento manuscript’ but the remarkable story of the way in which this music survived as a palimpsest, overwritten with bureaucratic records when the music was no longer fashionable, meaning that it has had to be physically ‘recovered’, makes it all the more valuable a treasure. Music by known composers such as Piero Mazzuoli, Jacopo da Bologna, Paulo da Firenze, Hubertus de Salinis and Antonio Zacara da Teramo makes up just a small part of the 216 compositions preserved in the San Lorenzo Palimpsest. The final stage in what must have been an extraordinarily laborious procedure is the committing by La Morra of 17 of the pieces to CD, and it is hard to imagine a more capable group or a more triumphant outcome. The playing and singing of La Morra, a group springing originally from the seminal Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, is superbly idiomatic, expressive and technically impeccable, evoking vividly the manuscript’s early 15th-century context. In Scotland, we have generally made a more thorough job of disposing of our musical manuscripts, but in the case of one 16th-century church manuscript, The Inverness Fragments, pages of church music deemed superfluous were used as stuffing in the binding of a law book, and in due course they could be ‘recovered’ and reconstructed. We enjoyed the same thrill as we sang this ‘retrieved music’ as I am sure La Morra felt when this stunning Florentine music sprang back to life before their eyes.

D. James Ross

Categories
Recording

Salterio italiano

Floral design

Romina Basso mezzo soprano, Il Dolce Conforto directed by Franziska Fleischanderl
62:16
Christophorus CHR 77426
Martini, Perotti, Girolamo Rossi, Ubaldi & Ugolino

But for a cpo CD by Salzburger Hofmusik with 18th-century music chiefly by Telemann featuring Salterio, which I actually bought for the contribution from chalumeaux and Baroque clarinet, I would have been as unaware as I guess most people are of the 18th-century vogue for the instrument. This programme includes delightful instrumental music by Fulgenzio Perotti, Florido Ubaldi and Vito Ugolino featuring the instrument as well as two works for solo alto by Giovanni Battista Martini and Girolamo Rossi which feature salterio in the accompanying ensemble. In Martini’s fine Motetto, due to the prominence of the solo voice, the salterio is initially just part of the accompanying texture, although presently in a couple of items it steps out of the shadows to take a more prominently solistic role alongside the vocalist. In Rossi’s Lezione Quarta, by contrast, the salterio plays a much more fundamental role. The hand-plucked strings of the salterio have a delightful tinkling quality, which allows it to contrast with the harpsichord when the two are playing together, and imbues music it participates in with an elegant and charming timbre. Although I have little to compare it with, Franziska Fleischanderl’s playing is beautifully effective and effortlessly elegant, while Romina Basso’s solo singing and the playing of the ensemble Il Dolce Conforto are both models of musicality and expressiveness. This whole unsuspected repertoire definitely deserves more general attention, and the musicians here have done us a great service in bringing it to a wider.

D. James Ross

Categories
Recording

Les inAttendus: Poetical Humors

Floral design

Vincent Lhermet accordion, Marianne Muller viola da gamba
62:26
harmonia mundi musique HMM 902610
Transcriptions of Bull, Dowland, East, Gibbons & Hume, etc.

A review of this CD of music by 17th-century masters Tobias Hume, John Dowland, Orlando Gibbons, Michael East and John Bull and contemporary composers Thierry Tidrow and Philippe Hersant played on modern button accordion and viola da gamba probably has no place on the EMR website. However, I found the arrangements and the playing so charming and idiomatic that I decided to include it. The plain vibrato-free sound of the accordion (yes, they can switch off that offensive warbling effect!) blends absolutely beautifully with the viol’s elegant tone, and at times you forget you are listening to what on paper looks like a bizarre combination, and hear instead the sound of a viol consort or a viol and organ combination. Of the two contemporary pieces receiving their world premiere recordings, I preferred the Hersant, but actually the early music is the main strength of this CD. Both accordionist Vincent Lhermet and viol player Marianne Müller have a fine sense of the idiom of this 17th-century chamber repertoire. This CD is a testimony to the fact that fine musicianship and a feel for idiom can transcend the mere mechanics of HIP performance. I play clarinet in a duo with a button accordionist, and we shall now be exploring some of this earlier repertoire!

D. James Ross