Category: Recording

Collegium Musicum Den Haag, Claudio Ribeiro
65:00
C. P. E. Bach: Symphony in D, Concerto Wq, 14, H417, Sonata in A minor Wq90.01, H522
W. F. Bach: Symphony in F
Barbella: Concerto III

My first reaction to putting this CD in my machine was, “Oh no, not C. P. E. Bach’s greatest hit [the D major Symphony] AGAIN!” It didn’t take me long, though, to realise that CMDH were not just going through the motions of producing a disc devoted to this music – they had grabbed it by the neck and decided to give it a good shake; these are performances of real vitality and, even if the programme is something of a calling card for the group with a Neapolitan recorder concerto at its heart and a sonata for keyboard with violin and cello accompaniment as another filler, that is insignificant when one is dealing with such stylish and passionate performances. Listening to the adagio of the harpsichord concerto was an emotionally draining experience, but not at all in a bad way – the deepest sentiments of C. P. E. Bach’s soul are seemingly laid out for all to feel, and Ribeiro and co. capture all the nuances to perfection. I think my only (slight) complaint about the whole set is the fact it took me so long to identify the outstanding players. To save readers the bother, the talented recorder player is Inês d’Avena – her even and pure sound reminds me a lot of the legendary Gudrun Heynes. If this group is new to you (as it was to me) do not hesitate to make their acquaintance – they have something to say, no matter what they are playing!

Brian Clark

Consortium Carissimi, Garrick Comeaux
71:20
Naxos 8.573256

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he two oratorios on this CD were published in the Garland series of facsimiles. As someone who has championed Graziani (and his Roman colleague, Foggia) for some time, it is always reassuring to hear performances that confirm the quality of this music – as the brief but informative note says, Graziani is “one of the best kept secrets of the early Italian Baroque”. I’m puzzled by the consecutive statements that Italian vocal music was usually performed one step below modern pitch, and that the performers have chosen to use A=415 as their pitch level. I imagine that going that extra semitone lower might have taken the edge (by which I’m being kind) off (especially) the soprano tone – some of their entries in imitative music (of which there is plenty, as Graziani is a skill contrapuntalist) are not the most accurate. That said, I admire the way the voices sing through phrases so that the hemiola cross rhythms are audible without being signposted or micromanaged by a director.

Brian Clark

Lena Neudauer violin, Martin Rummel cello
117:41 (2 CDs)
Capriccio C5264

For any composer new to me I turn first to my trusty Grove  before reading the booklet notes. Zani (1696-1767), a contemporary of the Baroque ‘greats’, was born in Italy but spent much of his time in Vienna. His music, although conventional in style, bears little resemblance to the Italian Vivaldian style. The booklet claims these twelve Divertimenti  to be the first works for this combination in which the two instruments are treated as equal partners, rather than the cello acting mainly as the bass line. Certainly this is minimal chamber music, and I felt the need for a little continuo at times to fill out the sparse texture – for any double stopping was a rare occurrence in Zani’s writing. This is neat playing from these two accomplished performers, if at times perhaps a little too spiky for my taste. Only the hardy might wish to hear all twelve works at one sitting, but they are nevertheless an interesting addition to the chamber repertoire of the period and would complement Rummel’s recent recording of the complete cello concerti of this composer. The booklet notes do not say whether these works correspond to either of the opus numbers given in the Grove works list for the same combination (given there as Sonate da Camera  or just Sonate), or whether these Divertimenti are a newly discovered set. The notes do, however, give helpful stylistic guidance on the music. For those who delight in collecting musical trivia, the notes mention that Zani died as a result of a coach turning over – rivalling Alkan’s noted bookcase death some 200 years later.

Ian Graham-Jones

The Choir of King’s College Cambridge, His Majestys Sagbutts & Cornetts, Stephen Cleobury
73:10
KGS0012 (SACD + Pure Audio Blu-ray disc)
Exultavit cor meum, Hodie completi sunt, In ecclesiis, Iubilate Deo, Litaniæ Beatæ Mariæ Virginis, Magnificat, Quem vidistis pastores, Surrexit Christus & Suscipe clementissime Deus
Canzona Prima, Seconda & Terza

[dropcap]I[/dropcap] approached this CD, recorded using the latest recording technology and available on two discs for SACD hybrid and blu-ray respectively, with very high hopes. One of my earliest encounters with the music of this period was precisely with the music of Gabrieli and indeed included much of the music on this disc. My first reaction was to admire the crystal clear sound which captures the spacious ambience of King’s College Chapel to perfection and gives the music a splendid grandeur. It was not long however before I was much more bothered than I had anticipated by the fact that the choir with its boy trebles was simply not the vocal sound for which this music conceived. Worse than that, much of the singing had an English politeness about it which seemed to me to emasculate Gabrieli’s highly dramatic idiom. In the couple of pieces where the choir was encouraged to be more flamboyant, such as Iubilate Deo, parts of the 14-part Magnificat and Hugh Keyte’s magnificent re-realisation of Quem vidistis, the singers produce a degree of excitement, but the rather mimsy In ecclesiis  which opens the disc and the unconvincing Suscipe clementissime Deus  with its less than magnificent account of the composer’s towering setting of ‘immensae maiestati’ are ultimately disappointing.

The solo voices are also patchy, not apparently sharing the same concepts of how Gabrieli should sound, and there were some contrapuntal guddles caused undoubtedly by the spacing of the forces. His Majestys Sagbutts and Cornetts provide fine accounts of Gabrieli’s instrumental canzonas and sonatas between the larger choral items, but even they sound cowed in some of the choral works. Any foray into this repertoire invites comparison with the work of specialist period ensembles such as Paul McCreesh’s Gabrieli Consort and Players and if, like me, you prefer your Gabrieli to be brash and thrilling you will always go for the sound of soaring falsettists and blaring brass rather than these rather diffident accounts. Although the programme note declares the recording to be ‘the culmination of considerable scholarship into the performance practice of Gabrieli’s Venice’, with the noble exception of Hugh Keyte’s cutting-edge and valuable contribution (published 2015 by The Early Music Company), there seems nothing terribly radical here, and indeed ironically many of the editions used date from the 1990s and one indeed is from Denis Arnold’s 1962 CMM, the very edition used for the 1967 recording which so inspired me as a child!

D. James Ross

Skip Sempé, Olivier Fortin
63:38
Paradizo PA0014

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his 1998 recording was, I think, a missed opportunity. Firstly, none of Bach’s works genuinely for two harpsichords is included and secondly there’s no really creative engagement with the originals to create music that looks and sounds like something the composer might have written for these forces. In the organ works, for instance, one player plays the manual parts, the other the pedal. So while, purely as noise, it offers a sumptuous experience, musically this did little for me. Well played, though.

David Hansell

Hannah Morrison, Esther Brazil, Meg Bragle, Kate Symonds-Joy, Peter Davoren, Nick Pritchard, Alex Ashworth, David Shipley SSAATTBB, Monteverdi Choir, English Baroque Soloists, John Eliot Gardiner
105:56 (2 CDs)
Soli Deo Gloria SDG722

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]t is thirty years since John Eliot Gardiner recorded the B minor Mass and this version, as his notes – largely material drawn from Chapter 13 of his Music in the Castle of Heaven – reveal, is a statement of where he and his players have got to after their immersion in the Cantatas over the millennium year and a host of performances since. The most obvious departure from his previous Bach is that the ‘solos’ are sung by members of the choir, so for example there is a lovely and intelligent balance between the Soprano and Alto (rather than a second soprano as asked for) in the Christe, clearly the fruit of having sung together frequently: this is a huge plus over the recordings which have hired-in soloists for these parts. The same is true of the Et in unum  of the Symbolum  too, where we first hear the admirable Meg Bragle. But Gardiner’s new version is still essentially a work sung by a full chorus, the polished and excellently prepared Monteverdi Choir. The attention to phrasing, accentuation and dynamic marks – applied in a somewhat romantic way – are wonderful, yet I couldn’t help wondering whether the effect Gardiner is after isn’t still in the grand heroic mode, rather than being informed by the latest scholarly discoveries and a fundamental desire to discover the layered nature of the music. He uses the 2010 Bärenreiter edition, but there is no discussion in the booklet of any of the critical issues the autograph score and its corrections raised in the light of the variations discovered in the autograph parts. There is no information either about instruments or temperament, so we are left guessing as to what informs and drives Gardiner’s decisions.

For example, all the music, except for the single-voice arias and duets, is sung by the full choir – which is 13.9.7.6, partnered by the band which is 6.6.4.3.2 strings who seem to play tutti thoughout as far as I can judge. This tutti makes a splendid sound, but dynamic contrasts on the whole are made by singers and players increasing or diminishing their volume rather than by adding to or diminishing the number of singers or violins. Perhaps this ‘modern’ view of the orchestra is where Bach had arrived at the end of his life, having witnessed – and helped in – its evolution from those independent cori  of brass, wind, strings, voices and continuo that he inherited from the scoring of previous generations and which is still apparent in cantatas originating in Weimar, like Der Himmel lacht!  (BWV31), into a more homogenous whole. Finding the right texture and tessitura seems to inform the choice of which voice sings which solo rather than a principled decision to present the Missa with essentially a vocal quintet, and adding the numbers of players and singers as required by the volume and texture of the music and how it is scored. Indeed Gardiner, when ruminating on the structure of the mass in chapter 13 of his Music in the Castle of Heaven  contrasts (p.491) ‘public (choral) with private (solo) utterance’. In his mind and on this recording there is no difference in the choral sound between the ‘intonation’ to the Symbolum, with its fugato on the Gregorian chant with a pair of violins and the full sound of the Patrem omnipotentem  that follows: both are delivered at full pelt as ‘public’ choral utterance. But surely a contrast should be made here that reflects the liturgical division between the celebrant’s intonation and the assembly’s response? Public and private are not categories that I recognize in scoring the vocal parts of a work like the B minor mass, even if you could make a case for treating the arias in the Passions in this way.

On the plus side, there are quintessential Gardiner moments – the terrific accelerando in the last four bars of the ritornello of the Quoniam  leading to the perilously fast but perfectly controlled Cum Sancto Spirito, which remains clear and in tune and is a tribute to choir’s and orchestra’s technical accomplishment in delivering just what Gardiner sets them. Not everyone will like the highly mannered phrasing in the first Kyrie, or the sharp accents and dynamic changes in the second Kyrie – and it feels a bit laboured, as though there are four beats in each bar rather than the two implied by the alla breve  ¢ time signature. But in the Missa as a whole, the dovetailing of the movements is beautifully managed, and the immediate start of the Qui sedes  as the Qui tollis  ends works for me. I admired the controlled and pent-up emotional control of the Incarnatus  and the choppy Crucifixus  with the darker colour accentuated by using only the 2nd sopranos, but the crescendo of the band in bar 36 before the accented entries in bars 37ff seems wildly anachronistic to me. I like the audible intake of breath before Et resurrexit, and if you think that the bass line et iterum venturus  (bar 74ff) should be sung tutti, you won’t hear a neater and more unanimous choral sound. We have a lighter, more lyrical bass (Alex Ashworth) to sing the Et in Spiritum sanctum, though the bass line of the chorus as a whole is coloured more by the dark voice of David Shipley who does the Quoniam  – it’s a darker, throatier sound than emerges from any other part. As the Confiteor  winds down, we step away from the old-style Gregorian cantus firmus into the almost Beethoven-like chromaticisms of the Adagio of the Et expecto  before subito vivace on the first beat of bar 147. As you would guess, this is managed dramatically in the classical manner. Here is where we see Gardiner at his best: putting into practice the theories he has come to adopt.

The Sanctus  is pretty steady, and the Osanna  continues in exactly the same tempo as the Pleni sunt coeli. The Agnus  allows us to hear Meg Bragle again on her own, and the final Dona nobis  can’t resist a pp start with a gradual crescendo in all the parts.

The playing is very fine, but the decision to avoid extreme temperaments and use tuning vents in the trumpets gives the band a modern feel: it’s safer, even if less exciting. You don’t get those ringing chords re-creating the fundamental so clearly without completely natural harmonics, as Suzuki seems belatedly to have discovered. The trumpets manage well enough – though there are hurried semiquavers in bar 67 of the Gloria, and an unhelpful accent (of relief?) on the final note of the run on the first beat of bar 47 of the Patrem omnipotentem, when it should just tail away. These are really nit-picking comments, but when so much else is so good, it is a pity for tiny details like this to let the side down.

So should you buy this version? I probably wouldn’t, though its technical competence is superb according to its own lights, and I loved hearing the members of the choir sing the solo and duet numbers. The Monteverdi Choir are hugely accomplished, and sing quite wonderfully. But you should certainly listen to it. It’s just that I’m not sure I like even my big-scale Bach like that any more. I prefer the excitement of the clean textures of a group like Václav Luks’ Collegium Vocale 1704, that I reviewed in the December 2013 EMR. But punters will love it – and it’s certainly a winner in the great English choral tradition of which Gardiner and his forces are and have been standard-bearers for so long.

David Stancliffe

Weser-Renaissance Bremen, Manfred Cordes
92:42 (2 CDs)
cpo 777 929-2

[dropcap]S[/dropcap]chütz assembled Symphoniae Sacrae I for publication in Venice in 1629, and the music he selected marks the bridge between the earlier Psalmen Davids (1619) – large-scale choral works in as many as four choirs – and the later more intimate solo and duet works with continuo that formed Geistliche Konzerte from 1636 & 1639. Only in 1650 comes Symphoniae Sacrae III, a further group of large-scale works which signals the renewed possibilities brought by the conclusion of the Thirty Years War in 1648.

In Symphoniae Sacrae I, Schütz writes sacred music that has a suspended, almost timeless quality. Vocal duets with a pair of violins or cornetti, a soprano and tenor with three fagotti, single voices with pairs of violins or a vocal duet with cornetto and sackbut, and David’s lament for Absalom for bass and four sackbuts offer sound pictures far removed from the essentially choral music of the previous generations. Here are highly coloured setting of (for the most part) words from the Psalter or the Song of Songs where vocal parts as well as the instrumental obligati demand a high level of technical virtuosity as well as a developed emotional intelligence from the performers. This isn’t your standard church music, and it certainly owes a good deal to the ideals of the ‘new music’, as well as to rising possibilities occasioned by the development of the newer melodic instruments – violins and fagotti as well as the established cornets and sackbuts.

In this pair of CDs, the performers exhibit a high degree of technical competence married with a desire to let the music speak for itself. The performances are clean but very slightly underwhelming, although that is better than having to endure singers with too much of a soloistic ego: this group includes the distinguished and experienced Hans Jörg Mammel and Harry van der Kamp. The blend and balance between the voices and instruments is good, and only occasionally did I wonder whether I would have varied the organ, harp and chitarrone of the continuo with a regal – a favourite continuo instrument in Germany with brass at this period. In this music, the words of the Latin texts are all-important and are delivered confidently, audibly and fluently. The instrumentalists sound as if they have listened to the singers’ articulation, and make an effort to shape their phrases to it. And it is good to have this marvellous music – so key to Schütz’ long and partly hidden development – presented freshly and scored intelligently.

Why then do I not feel more enthusiastic about this production? Partly I suspect because Symphoniae Sacrae I is so evidently ‘work in progress.’ Schütz has come a long way, but there is further to go – and while he has absorbed much of the language of the seconda prattica, there has yet to emerge his mature synthesis, his true voice; and this take reflects this to some extent. But partly also because some other performances – I discount the older version by the Leipzig Capella Fidicina under Hans Gruß, preferring that of the complete Schütz Edition (Vol I) with Capella Augustana under Matteo Messori (now issued complete by Brilliant Classics) – feel as though they have a more committed approach and are recorded more brightly. The acid test for Symphonie Sacrae I is the tripping rhythm of the tenor in In te Domine speravi on the word “libera”. Cordes’ singer doesn’t quite have the rhythmic abandon required to convince listeners that it is for freedom that you are praying. So while I am glad to hear this version, it is not automatically my first choice for this enormously attractive and significant music.

David Stancliffe