Fabio Bonizzoni, La Risonanza
63:17
Glossa GCD C81505
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his is a re-release of a 2000 recording. Giuseppe was the elder brother of the better known Giovanni Battista. Born in 1695, he left Milan for London in 1728, where he stayed until his death in 1750, making quite a name for himself. These concertos, published after his death for “Harpsichord or Organ”, are domestic in scale, with just two violins, cello and bass alongside the organ. It is not clear when they were composed, but they have more of a Rococo than Baroque feel to them, rather enhanced by the playing style on this CD. The spiky solo registrations are not in keeping with the English organ of the period, and nor is the over-articulated performance style. Bonizzoni keeps to the two-part structure of most of the organ solos (without infilling the harmonies, a debatable point for this repertoire), but it is a shame that he doesn’t make more of the organ when in its continuo role – it is more-or-less inaudible. The notes give no information on the organ, but I have a feeling it is later than this repertoire. It is certainly not in any English or Italian early to mid 18th-century style. Two lively little Sonatas by Giovanni Battista Sammartini complete the disc.
Olivier Baumont organ & piano organisé
63:31
Radio France TEM316053
Music by Balbastre, Beauvarlet-Charpentier, Benaut, Corrette, A-L Couperin & Lasceux
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he CD was so tightly jammed into the central jaws that it snapped in half as I tried to get it out of the box. However I found snippets of all the pieces on the internet. The period leading up to the French Revolution formed the technical peak of the French Classical organ although the music written for it didn’t reach similar heights. In France, the musical highlight came around 1700 with De Grigny, after which pieces became increasingly secular and fanciful in character – and more fun. Pushing the earlier Baroque forms and colours to extremes, the likes of Balbastre ended up providing entertainment for the revolutionary populace in the newly desig-nated Temples of Reason, saving many important organs from destruction in the process. This CD covers most of the composers of the mid to late 18th century, along with the varied musical styles, most loosely based on the earlier Baroque concepts of registration and form. The 1748 Dom Bedos organ in Sainte-Croix, Bordeaux, is one of the finest surviving organs of this period, with a rich palette of tonal colours. The 1791 Erard-frères piano organisé used for several central tracks produces a fascinating and unusual sound and brings the sound world into the domestic scene. Olivier Baumont takes this repertoire seriously, as he should, and is a compelling advocate for an often-criticised period of French music.
Ulrike Hofbauer, Ensemble &cetera
71:53
Raumklang RK 3306
Music by Berti, Carissimi, Castaldi, Ferrari, Frescobaldi, Huygens, D’India, de Macque, Mayone, Mazzocchi, Merula, Nauwach, Orlandi, Rasi, Luigi Rossi, Barbara Strozzi & Trabaci
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his CD takes us on a tour of the rich 17th-century Italian repertoire for solo voice and continuo. The success or failure of such an enterprise relies heavily on the prowess of the soloist, and Ulrike Hofbauer has a lovely voice and a ready sense of the drama inherent in the music she is singing. She is helped considerably here by a small but inspired consort of instruments consisting of arpa doppia, chitarrone and lirone alternating with a treble viol. They come into their own in the lovely instrumental works which punctuate the programme and which they play with a wonderful freedom and spon-taneity. These are qualities which they also bring to their accompanying, allowing them to respond appropriately to Hofbauer’s creative interpretation of the vocal lines. The programme note addresses the rather oxymoronic title of the CD by explaining that the voice is in dialogue with the listener, and certainly this is a recording which demands your undivided attention and, with its constantly changing colours and moods, fully earns it. All the big names of the period are here – Trabaci, Carissimi, Gastoldi, Frescobaldi, Strozzi, D’India, Merula and Luigi Rossi – but the performers have looked beyond the obvious to the less familiar and have included works by the likes of Camillo Orlandi, Giovanni Pietro Berti and Giovanni de Macque. Accounts of the singing of the 17th-century Roman soprano Leonora Baroni suggest that she augmented her singing with gestures and appropriate movements like an opera singer, and listening to this music it is easy to imagine such dramatization working extremely effectively.
Georg Poplutz, Felix Rumpf, Dresdner Kammerchor, Hans-Christoph Rademann
70:27
Carus 83.259
+Litania SWV458, O du allersüßester SWV340, In dich hab ich gehofft SWV446
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his eleventh volume in the Dresdener Kammerchor’s projected complete recording of the works of Heinrich Schütz brings them to a work of his extreme old age, his Matthew Passion. According to Dresden Schlosskapelle edicts up to the end of the 17th century, instruments were forbidden from playing during passion tide, as a result of which three quarters of Schütz’s Matthew Passion consists of unaccompanied recitative while the balance is made up of a cappella choral singing. The former can be a little wearing for modern audiences, although the undoubted power of the choral contribution is undoubtedly heightened by the minimalism of the bulk of the work. The huge dramatic and musical responsibility which lands on the shoulders of the Evangelist and Jesus is easily born by Georg Poplutz and Felix Rumpf respectively, who sing with engaging expression and drama. And if you like your 17th-century part-music sung by a small choir, as opposed to a group of soloists singing one to a part, you couldn’t ask for more effective advocates than the Dresdener Kammerchor who sing with admirable focus and unanimity. The fillers are also small treasures, particularly the late setting of Luther’s Litania, which in this performance takes on an almost narcotic quality, with its statement and response pattern. Particularly touching are the translation of the Agnus Dei and Kyrie which occur at the end, almost like a folk memory of the Catholic Mass. I noticed an occasional small degree of distortion on the Evangelist’s microphone as if he was sometimes overstepping the max setting, or perhaps standing too close to the microphone, but otherwise the recording is of Carus’s usual high quality.
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his CD by the superb Compagnia del Madrigale is something of a masterclass in madrigal singing. I decided to take the opportunity to try to analyse the secrets of the Compagnia’s impressive soundworld. The voices are all of course superb in their own right, rounded, supremely expressive and completely stable at whatever dynamic they are singing. However, I went on to detect two further features which I think help with this specific repertoire. The first may seem obvious but is by no means uniform or even universally regarded as a virtue among small vocal ensembles : this is the rigorous avoidance of vibrato. The soprano section is particularly striking in this respect, but on this CD there are also impressively ‘true’ entries from tenors and altos. Debate all you like about how singers of the period may have sung with or without vibrato, there is no denying that performances of madrigals which are largely vibrato-free allow the listener to appreciate the full power of the polyphonic writing. The searing power of vibratoless musical exclamations is also undeniable. The second feature is the perfect blend of clearly defined voices, achieved interestingly without a conductor. I wouldn’t like the superlative quality of the singing to overshadow the music in my review, so I should say that this CD confirms Luca Marenzio as one of the most underrated madrigal composers in spite of recent efforts to bring his music to wider attention. These six-part works are masterpieces of counterpoint using cutting-edge harmonic manipulation to match the twists and turns of the texts.
La Dolce Maniera, Luigi Gaggero
54:23
Stradivarius STR 37010
[dropcap]L[/dropcap]a dolce maniera have adopted a highly original approach to the love madrigal here by taking at least one madrigal from each of Gesualdo’s published volumes, twenty madrigals in all, and arranging them into a ‘romantic song cycle’ charting the establishment, growth and eventual implosion of a romance. The sequence is indeed cumulatively effective, although perhaps mercifully it doesn’t culminate in the sort of bloodbath which accompanied Gesualdo’s own disappointment in love in real life! The group’s highly ‘affected’ style of singing works very well with this mercurial repertoire. Less convincing is the decision to sing the music untransposed, leaving some of the soprano lines painfully and awkwardly high. I can understand the principle of this, but we now live in world where the prevailing judgement of musicologists seems to be to ‘sing it where it feels comfortable’, and just occasionally here the sopranos sound seriously uncomfortable. The group’s director Luigi Gaggero would argue that this discomfort is just the effect Gesualdo was looking for, but the fact is that nobody wants to listen to distressed singers, and I began to wonder uncharitably whether he had developed this theory before or after listening to the recordings. The fact is these are not impossibly high notes in themselves and perhaps the sopranos just needed to develop a slightly different technical approach. Anyway I don’t want this relatively minor issue to overshadow an otherwise enjoyable and innovative recording.
Nicholas Achten baritone, Deborah York soprano, Lambert Colson cornetto, Scherzi Musicali
75:49
Deutsche Harmonia Mundi 88843078722
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his intriguing CD takes the Orpheus legend as a springboard to explore the world of early opera. To a surprising extent the legend dominated the early years of opera, providing in its story a powerful message about the power of music, but also a hero who conveniently performs monophonically to his own instrumental accompaniment. What Nicholas Achten has done here is stitched together a fantasy opera in which numbers from a range of these early settings are placed in sequence to retell the story. At first I determined to listen to the sequence ‘blind’ to see whether the music by Monteverdi stood out from his contemporaries as many commentators suggest that it ought to. Of course this proved impossible to judge as I already knew the Monteverdi well, but to my mind much of the ‘supporting’ music by Rossi, Merula, Caccini, Cavalieri, Piccinini, Falconieri, Landi, Sartorio and of course Peri seemed highly effective and, in the hands of Scherzi Musicali, powerfully expressive.
The role of Orfeo is taken by the Nicholas Achten, whose light baritone voice seems constantly on the verge of ornamentation and is perfectly suited to the music – his account of the Monteverdi’s superlative aria Possente spirto is one of the finest I have heard. His Euridice, who in keeping with the earliest settings plays a much smaller role in the drama, is Deborah York whose soprano voice is also convincingly expressive. The accompanying consort of strings plus two cornetts and a range of continuo keyboards including harpsichord, organ and virginals occasionally joined by theorbo, guitar, harp and bass cittern provides highly charged textures to support the singers as well as performing purely instrumental items with considerable delicacy and passion. This CD is a true pleasure to listen to, and provides the very useful service of bringing several early operatic composers out of the textbooks and into the limelight, if perhaps in the context of a co-operative effort which few of them would have countenanced in life.
Jordi Savall rebec, tenor vielle, rebab Pedro Estevan percussion
74′
Alia Vox AVSA9907
[dropcap]I[/dropcap] have to confess that I approached this recording with some doubts; the Cantigas de Santa Maria are all songs, over 400 of them, and here is a purely instrumental version with no singing! Of course, Savall and a number of others have recorded many of the Cantigas in both sung and instrumental versions. Here he performs instrumental versions of 12 alongside 11 traditional Galician dances from what he describes as ‘oral sources’. Thanks to the wonderful internet – which has the complete manuscript available – you can check out what he does with the material from which he is working.
Peter Dronke (The Medieval Lyric) says that accompanying dancing “was one of the prime functions of lyric throughout the Middle Ages”. Fra Angelico’s wonderful ‘Last Judgement’ depicts sixteen angels doing a round dance without any instruments apparent – clearly all singing as they danced. However, Johannes de Grocheio’s remark that “The good artist generally introduces every cantus and cantilena and every musical form on the vielle”, together with the large number of instruments depicted in the manuscript (many of which are reproduced in the lavishly illustrated booklet) well justifies a purely instrumental rendition. Anyway with so few surviving instrumental dances from the period, as much of dance music was improvised, or played by non-readers, one must needs be creative.
I shouldn’t have worried. By taking the notated music of the Cantigas, and putting it in the context of traditional, orally transmitted Galician dance music, he comes up with something that not only seems very true to the spirit of the older music, but is great listening.
He plays three different instruments: a Moorish rebec, waisted with four strings and frets; a 5-string rebec dating from the 15th century – also with frets, which looks to me more like a vielle, as it is also waisted; a 5-string tenor fiddle/vielle. The percussion ranges in pitch and timbre from a gorgeously boomy tambour, a bright sounding darbuka and tuned bells. The sounds of the three string instruments are beautifully varied. The ‘rebel morisco’ sounds as though it has a skin sound-board, and the illustration bears this out – giving an intriguing ‘hollowness’ to the sound.
As you would expect, the playing is fantastic, spontaneous, brilliant. I loved the Ductia & Rota with its uneven phrases – four measures and then three measures, a wonderful catchy rhythm, an intuitive reaction to the material.
Savall encourages us to consider the most ancient of our musical traditions in the context of living folk music. The 13th-century notation of the Cantigas is comparatively clear, but an approach like this can bring them so alive, an inspiring recording of what has been called “one of the greatest monuments of medieval music”.
Contrapunctus, Owen Rees
68:18
Signum Records SIGCD408 Byrd Audivi vocem, Circumdederunt me dolores mortisGerarde Sive vigilemMundy Sive vigilemParsons Credo quod redemptor, Libera me Domine, Peccantem me quotidieSheppard Media vitaTallis Nunc dimittisTaverner Quemadmodum
[dropcap]L[/dropcap]ike his counterpart in Scotland Thomas Wode, John Baldwin is among a handful of musicians whom we have to thank for the preservation of the treasury of sixteenth-century choral music. Baldwin was particularly diligent, recording almost 170 works from early in the century right up to his own lifetime in the last quarter of the 1500s, many of which survive as unique copies. Most of the output of John Sheppard survives this way, although the loss of the tenor partbook has necessitated the reconstruction of that voice, leading to Sheppard somewhat ‘missing the bus’ in the revival in the middle of the last century of interest in Tudor church music. Contrapunctus under their enterprising director, Owen Rees, are devoting a series of CDs to these important partbooks, grouping their programmes by theme. It may seem perverse to start with death, but its ubiquity and immediacy for Tudor composers has led to a particularly fine and poignant body of music remaining from the time.
The undeniable jewel in the crown of this selection is Sheppard’s magisterial setting of Media vita which gives the CD its title, but the chief joy for me were the one or two works with which I was hitherto unfamiliar, such as William Byrd’s Circumdederunt me dolores mortis, which opens the programme, and the powerful Sive vigilem by the Flemish émigré Dericke Gerarde. The singing throughout is consistently full-toned and focussed, but essentially for this repertoire constantly ready with expressive crescendos and decrescendos to mark textual changes in mood. With its nine highly experienced singers (boosted to ten for the larger works) Contrapunctus is the ideal group for this superb repertoire, and I look forward with eager anticipation to future CDs in this series.
D. James Ross
[dropcap]A[/dropcap]n absolutely superb disc, both musically and musicologically. John Baldwin was a layclerk at St George’s Chapel, Windsor at the time these five (originally six – the tenor is missing) partbooks were copied, between about 1575 and 1581. They contain a huge range of Latin-texted music, ranging in period from Taverner to Byrd, much of it uniquely preserved. The present recording takes as its theme music “concerned with mortality- the fear of death and eternal torment, anticipation of the Day of Judgement, and the soul’s longing to meet God” and includes settings from the Catholic Office of the Dead, as well as penitential motets, perhaps for private Recusant use after the Reformation. With pieces (and performances) of such uniformly high quality, it is difficult to single out any one especially, though Dericke Gerarde was a new name for me; his wonderfully expansive and expressive setting of Sive Vigilem is one I shall be replaying often! The recital appropriately concludes with John Sheppard’s massive and magnificent Media Vita – listen out for the wonderful final verse, with its typically English gimell in both the treble and mean, supported by the bass, far below. Extraordinary music, gloriously performed!
[Sunhae Inn, Petra Noskaiová, Stephan Scherpe, Jan Van der Crabben SATB], La Petite Bande, Sigiswald Kuijken
139:22 (2 CDs)
Challenge Classics CC72394
[dropcap]K[/dropcap]uijken’s Weihnachtsoratorium is a treat: it’s clear as a bell, with every note of every line audible, and the tuning very precise. As you would expect from La Petite Bande, it’s all one-to-a-part, except for doubling the upper strings, so the balance of voices, strings, wind and brass is as it is, and the liner notes say that this hasn’t been messed around with by the recording engineers! No finger-holes in the trumpets, so ringing D major chords and some lovely 6ths, and Sara Kuijken, the second violin, doubles elegantly as the echo soprano in Flößt, mein Heiland in IV.4.
The voices are a pretty good blend: Kuijken often uses Van der Crabben, and while the clarity of his real bass voice provides an excellent foundation for the singers, he can also offer a lyrical quality in arias like Erleucht auch meine finstre Sinnen with the oboe d’amore in V.5 or the duet with the soprano in III.6. Petra Noskaiová, the alto, is another of Kuijken’s frequent singers, and is very good too – she has all the clarity you need for the chorus work, and a robust and distinctive sound for the solo material: listen to her line in the Terzetto in V.9, where she offers a very distinctive counter-balance to the S/T duet. The tenor, Stephan Scherpe, is a real find, singing the choruses with control and restraint, the evangelista with effortless clarity and his arias – especially Frohe Hirten – with precision and panache. About the soprano I feel less sure. The voice quality is always more problematic as you go higher in the vocal range, and although she is fine when not under pressure (as in Flößt, mein Heiland in IV.4), Sunhae Im does not match the superlative boy, Leopold Lampelsdorfer, who recorded I-III with Holger Eichhorn and the Musicalische Compagney in 2012 (which I reviewed in EMR 153) in the ensemble work. (Eichhorn never did IV to VI with Lampelsdorfer.) There is something about sopranos singing OVPP which needs exploring: it is more audible, and so more distracting, if you press on a note tied over a barline, which can add an unhelpful and occasionally panicky-sounding edge, rather than floating these held notes as a viol player would; and then there is the question of whether the almost unconscious soloist’s vibrato – especially in concerted passages – confuses the choral texture. How can singers learn to judge the different style that is needed for an aria and then in the chorus of four voices? Having said this, the ensemble is excellent in the largely homophonic passage like Wo ist der neugeborne König (V.3)
Tempi are judicious – perhaps a bonus from not having a driven conductor in charge? – and I imagine the layout is similar to the Petite Bande performances you can see on YouTube, where the singers stand together in front of the organ in the middle, and the players ring them on a raised box – strings on the left-hand side and the substantial bass violin next to the organ (there isn’t any 16’ of course – and I don’t miss it) with the brass and wind to the right. With Kuijken leading and directing the ensemble from the wing of the instruments, there are only occasional moments when I feel the lack of an independent conductor, but the players are attentive to each other, and know where to make the minute adjustments for the singers that give this performance its caressing chamber music quality without sacrificing its dancelike energy.
I like this performance, and am very happy to live with it long-term.
