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Bach Nostalghia

Bach Nostalghia Francesco Piemontesi

Francesco Piemontesi piano
52:14
Pentatone PTC 5186 846

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On this CD Francesco Piemontesi plays mainly transcriptions of Bach by the 19th-/20th-century composer and piano virtuoso Ferruccio Busoni, as well as one transcription each by pianist Wilhelm Kempff and organist Egon Petri, an homage by Busoni to Bach and even some straight Bach, albeit on the piano. A thoughtful programme note tries to put this music in the context of its time, when the concept of authentic performance had not yet been conceived of, and performers from Mendelssohn to Liszt felt free to adapt, arrange and otherwise muck about with earlier music under the guise of bringing it to a wider audience. We would recall Mendelssohn’s ‘performance edition’ of Bach’s St Matthew Passion with its clarinets and its string quartet renditions of continuo recitative accompaniments. Nowadays it is deeply out of fashion to meddle too much with earlier musical sources, the idea of playing Baroque music on a modern piano being perhaps a dying vestige of a previous attitude. It can hardly be surprising that as a child of the HIP movement, I find Bach on the piano, let alone transcribed for the piano, a bit of a musical cul-de-sac. Interesting to find a CD where these transcriptions themselves are treated as a historical phenomenon, and where they are performed with a HIP perspective. Busoni’s own Toccata is an interesting example of Bach through the looking glass, and we would perhaps recall Bach’s own transcriptions of earlier music – how would Vivaldi have felt hearing his violin concertos arranged for clutches of harpsichords?

D. James Ross

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Sculpting the fabric

CD cover of La vaghezza Sculpting the fabric on Ambronay

Works by Cavalli, Merula, Vitali, Fontana, S. Rossi…
La Vaghezza
52:50
Ambronay AMY313

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This sparkling CD of instrumental music from 17th-century Italy features the youthful ensemble La Vaghezza, whose virtuosity and innate musicality shine through in this innovative programme. The title comes from Nigel North, who wrote of early music needing to be sculpted anew by performers using ornamentation and elaboration to create something new each time. While the idea of sculpting fabric seems a little perverse, the performers on two violins, theorbo, cello and harpsichord/organ certainly use wonderfully imaginative ornamentation and vivid playing techniques to bring this music to spectacularly life. La Vaghezza is new upon the scene, and enjoys the support of the EEEmerging scheme for young artists, a scheme which must have proved invaluable during the last two troubled years for the performing arts. This ensemble, brimming with youthful energy and talent, is just the sort of group to inject dynamism into the performing circuit, and these accounts of the earliest Italian virtuoso music for violins are thrilling and constantly intriguing.

D. James Ross

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I Diporti della villa in ogni stagione 1601

CD cover I diporti della villa Venezia 1601

Gruppo vocali Àrsi & Tèsi, Tony Corradini
65:06
Tactus TC 590005

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The madrigal collection ‘The pastimes of the Villa in each season’ published in Venice in 1601 consists of settings by eminent composers of the day, some better remembered than others – Giovanni Croce, Lelio Bertani, Ippolito Baccusi and Filippo de Monte – of verses by the aristocrat Francesco Bozza. Each composer takes a complete season, treated in five parts and interestingly each referred to in the dedication as a single song. The parallels with the almost exactly contemporary ‘Triumphs of Oriana’ are interesting and point at an urge towards the encyclopaedic at the time. The balance of the music on the CD is made up with sundry other madrigals which mention the seasons by the familiar Nanino, Marenzio, de Lasso and Schütz, and the rather more obscure and interesting Rinaldo del Mel and Mogens Pederson. The quality of the madrigals in the collection as well as the added material is high, and they are beautifully sung by the vocal ensemble. This could well have been just an aristocratic vanity project, but the fact that the composers clearly liaised, not to say competed, with one another ensured a consistently high compositional standard. The structure of the publication and its title makes it very clear that it was viewed as a single large four-part work, and was intended to be performed in its entirety, as it is here. The astute choice of complementary material makes this CD thoroughly engaging and entertaining, while the expressive and technically flawless performances ensure that the attention never wanders.

D. James Ross

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Recording

Rameau: Achante et Céphise

CD cover Rameau Achante et Céphise Kossenko

Sabine Devieilhe Céphie, Cyrelle Dubois Achante, David Witczak Le Génie Oroès, Judith can Wandroij Zirphile, Les Chantres du Centre de musique baroque de Versailles, Les Ambassadeurs, La Grande Écurie, Alexis Kossenko
130:25 (2 CDs in a card box)
Erato 1 90296 69394 6

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Even fervent Ramellians can be forgiven for not having previously encountered Achante et Cephise, a pastorale héroïque composed and performed at the Paris Opéra in 1751 to celebrate the birth of Louis-Joseph Xavier, the son of Louis XV and named by the king as his heir apparent. For all the festivities and expectations, sadly the child would live only until the age of eight. After 14 performances the opera suffered the fate common to occasional works, being put aside with its preserved edition as was not uncommon lacking the middle parts. There it remained virtually undisturbed until the late 1990s, when a scholarly edition was published. Even then the work has had to wait a further quarter of a century for a complete performance and this recording.

One reason for this astonishing neglect may be the complexity of a work that calls for large orchestral forces including clarinets, used here with independent parts in a French opera for the first time. There is also an elaborate transformation scene that takes it from intense realms of dramatic near-tragedy to the brilliant celebratory scene with which it concludes. That in itself is unusual; such scenes are traditionally the substance of a prologue, but Achante has no prologue and – in keeping with its genre – only three acts rather than the five familiar from tragédie lyrique. To compensate it has a highly original programmatic overture which itself announces the rejoicing at the birth, with sections marked ‘Voeux de la Nation – Tocsin – Feu d’Artifice – Fanfare’. Rameau’s collaborator Jean-François Marmontel provided him with a book that also goes beyond the bounds of what might be expected in a pastorale designed to celebrate a noble birth. True, the story concerns a shepherdess and shepherd, Céphise and Achante whose happiness is thwarted by the jealousy of a spirit, Oroès. But the story develops to a thrilling dramatic climax in which hero and heroine on the orders of Oroès are abducted by north winds. That intense drama carries over from the end of act 2 straight into act 3, thus predicating the even more dramatic events which a dozen years later would engulf Alphise and Abaris as act 3 of Les Boréades spills over into act 4. The fate awaiting the lovers in Achante, in chains awaiting execution in a bleak landscape, belongs more to tragédie lyrique than pastorale. Interspersed between the drama, the dances of the divertissements are also more varied than is often the case, perhaps the most striking being a hunting scene in which the dances are accompanied almost entirely by wind and brass including the brazen braying of no fewer than four horns.

The performance owes much to the admirable Centre de musique baroque de Versailles (would that there were such an organisation in Britain) and includes much to praise. Indeed the least appealing aspect of the recording is the sound. It was made in the church of Notre-Dame-du-Libon in Paris, which here displays an over-generous reverberation period with its resultant inappropriate ecclesiastical ambiance. Give or take the odd stolidly-phrased dance, Alexis Kossenko’s direction is admirable, being especially effective in more dramatic music, and he draws some fine playing from his large band. Particularly good is some of wind playing, notably in the hunt scene mentioned above. All four of his main soloists are excellent, with Sabine Devieilhe a touchingly vulnerable Céphise and Cyrille Dubois an ardent Achante who despatches the demanding bravura aria in the final scene with commendable assurance. Baritone David Witczak projects the role of the evil Oroès to strong effect, as does Judith van Wanrou that of the good fairy Zirphile, some forced tone in the upper register notwithstanding. As is now customary given the current strength of early music in France, the numerous smaller vocal parts are without exception admirably taken. This resurrection of an unaccountably forgotten work demands to be heard by all who value French Baroque opera.

Brian Robins

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Recording

See, see, the word is incarnate

CD cover See, see, the word is incarnate

Choral and instrumental music by Gibbons, Tomkins and Weelkes
The Chapel of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, Newe Vialles, Orpheus Britannicus Vocal Consort, Andrew Arthur
70:51
resonus RES10295

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Despite a long and distinguished history, Trinity Hall, founded as early as 1350, is one of the lesser-known colleges that make up the University of Cambridge. It must be tired of reviewers and others attributing this to the subsequent foundation in 1546 of the bigger and wealthier Trinity College, allegedly given so similar a name deliberately by its founder Henry VIII to spite Trinity Hall’s then Master, Stephen Gardiner, who had opposed the king’s marriage to Anne Boleyn. I was well aware of Trinity Hall but am mortified to confess that I knew nothing of its chapel, nor of its chapel choir and its several discs released before the one currently under review here. On the basis of this recording, the state of its music is certainly of a piece with the college’s eminent stature. The mixed Chapel Choir has 23 members (7S 6A 5T 5B) and verses are sung by members of Orpheus Britannicus, the Ensemble in Residence which consists of seven singers who are well kent in early music circles. Accompaniments are provided by the organ scholar James Grimwood or the five-strong consort Newe Vialles (named after the new group of six viol players brought from Italy to England by Henry VIII), while the several organ solos are played by the college’s Director of Music, Andrew Arthur, who also conducts.

The contents of this recording (similar in scope to I Heard a Voice by The Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, and Fretwork, Warner Classics 3944302, 2007) can be viewed from two perspectives. For those who do not routinely sing or hear late Tudor and Jacobean music, it consists of some of the finest music from before the time of Purcell. For those who routinely hear or perform the repertory of Tudor and Jacobean music, the list of contents would seem to consist of disappointingly familiar fare – even the instrumental items by Weelkes, the least populated area of his output, have had their fair sprinkling of recordings. That said, most commercial recordings require the mystical “USP”, the unique selling point that differentiates them from others in the field. Not too many discs can be expected to sell simply on the strength of the performers: probably a CD of Stile Antico gargling would sell by the bucketload, but choirs such as Trinity Hall need that elusive USP. Fortunately it is present on this disc, and it is the tempi at which most of these works are sung: slowly. This might seem unpromising, but works such as Gibbons’ Short Service were not composed to be sung at the dismissively hurried lick which too many conductors take during cathedral or collegiate Choral Evensongs and on commercial recordings: the writing is full of subtleties which are lost at speed. That said, just plain slow performances can be sluggish, but it is entirely possible to sing a piece slowly yet with care and momentum so as to bring out its harmonic, melodic and technical beauties, and this is precisely what Trinity Hall achieve both in the settings for evensong, and in the full and verse anthems. For instance, the ultra-famous This is the record of John normally comes in at just over four minutes, while here it takes a luxurious 5’06; similarly See, see the word is incarnate usually runs for around seven minutes while here it is given 8’14. And nowhere throughout the disc is there a dull moment, half because of the quality of the music and half because of the leisured intensity of the performances.

The booklet is good, being both informative and well illustrated. Unfortunately the author trots out the tired old fiction that viols might have been employed “in the Chapel Royal and other private chapels”. There is not a shred of surviving evidence that any such performances ever took place during the lifetimes of the composers represented here. Where liturgical verse anthems with accompaniments for the organ survive with authentic alternative accompaniments for viols, it is clear from the provenances of the respective sources that the latter were intended for domestic performance; it is, therefore, perhaps all the more authentic for these versions to be sung with female participation.

And finally, what of the performances here? They are consistently good. There is a richness about the tone of the choir which suggests a Baroque sensibility rather than the more austere Anglican approach which is often adopted for the music of these composers. Thanks to the slower tempi, individual parts are easily audible while the voices blend beautifully. This is a most impressive recording. For potential purchasers unfamiliar with the repertory but keen to give it a hearing (or just keen to support Trinity Hall), it is a delightful introduction. For those familiar with this music, and who possess recordings of all these pieces, it is well worth buying this disc for the singularly ripe yet penetrating performances.

Richard Turbet

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Recording

Giovanni Gabrieli: Gloria a Venezia!

CD cover Giovanni Gabrieli Gloria a Venezia

La Guilde des Mercenaires, Adrien Mabire
53:47
Château de Versailles Spectacles CVS041

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Grand scale pieces by Giovanni Gabrieli and contemporaries are often given a rather ponderous grandeur in performance. This disc offers a different  balance, instead maintaining a sense of energy and forward momentum. The overlapping choirs pass the baton without breaking pace, adding a fervent muscularity to this popular repertoire. Whilst this provides a welcome new light on many familiar pieces, applied relentlessly it can occasionally feel rather breathless, and misses opportunities for the music to put down the occasional foot and make a point. An example might be Angelus ad pastores ait, in which the exchange between the narrative voice represented by one choir passing over to the reported speech of the Angel in the other, without feeling the opening and closing speech marks. The pieces regularly change scale to give contrast. Thus we move from the opening Magnificat by Merulo with its full panoply of voices, cornetts and sackbuts, to Gabrieli’s canzon terza a 4, performed on solo cornett with organ. The contrast between the Merulo, with colla parte instruments, unusually including the top voice with a slightly tiring effect, and the following canzon, was a touch severe particularly as this piece for four instruments is constructed as sets of dialogues and calls out for distinct “voices”. Two other four-part canzoni leaven the programme further on: one with four instruments, and one more with cornett and organ. Ordering the realisations differently would have been easier on my ear (but, admittedly, this is just personal taste). The organ used has a splendid sonority – a noticeable step towards the historic cathedral organs from the smaller organs often used in modern performance – and is very fluently played. The organ ricercar, which makes a later appearance, has a real presence and immediacy. The singers are excellent and carry conviction, blending very well with each other and with the well-shaped instrumental playing. A fine addition to the CD collections of admirers of La Serenissima.

Stephen Cassidy

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Recording

Mozart: Mitridate, Re di Ponto

CD cover Minkoski Mozart Mitridate, Re di Ponto

Michael Spyres Mitridate, Julie Fuchs Aspasia, Sabine Devieihle Ismene, Elsa Dreisig Sifare, Paul-Antoine Bénos-Djian Franace, Cyrille Dubois Marzio, Adriana Bignani Lesca Arbate, Les Musiciens du Louvre, Marc Minkowski
151:11 (3 CDs in a card box)
Erato 1 90296 61757 7

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Mitridate represents an important milestone in Mozart’s composing career, his first attempt at composing a full-length serious opera. It owes its existence to a commission received when father Leopold and the 14 year-old Wolfgang stayed in Milan in the early months of 1770 during the course of their first Italian tour. The subject of the libretto the boy was asked to set was a historical figure, King Mithridates , the despotic ruler of Pontus, a Hellenic country on the Black Sea today part of Turkey. Mithridates was a fierce opponent of the Romans, but – like most plots based on history – considerable licence was taken by the libretto of V A Cigna-Santi, who based his book on a play by Racine. It concerns the return of Mitridate to Pontus following defeat by Pompey. Suspicious of the loyalty of his own sons, Farnace and Sifare, not least their intention towards his young bride-to-be Aspasia, Mitridate inspires a rumour he is dead to test them. Sifare has indeed fallen in love with Aspasia, in so doing rejecting the gentle princess Ismene. Farnace on the other hand is revealed as the traitor who has fallen under the spell of Roman influence in the person of the Roman tribune Marzio. The opening is thus nicely poised for a conflict of loyalties and emotional turmoil of the kind on which opera seria thrived, indeed depended.   

The opera was first given by a star-studded cast at the Teatro Regio Ducale in Milan on 26 December 1770, being well received and achieving a run of 22 performances, no mean achievement for a new opera in a major house at the time. Both the lavish staging and Mozart’s music were praised, the latter by the Gazzetta di Milano for his studies of ‘the beauties of [human] nature and representing them ‘adorned with the rarest music graces’. The opera is in the usual three acts, dominated by the customary da capo arias and just a single duet (between Aspasia and Sifare) to end act 2. Less conventional is the number of accompanied recitatives (6) that perhaps better than the arias show the young composer’s astonishing and seemingly innate ability to lay open human emotions, often of a profundity and complexity he should not have been able to understand at such a tender age.

As befits a glamorous cast, many of the aria are virtuoso pieces that, as was customary in the 18th century, were tailor-made by Mozart for the singers, with whom he worked closely to ‘fit the costume to the figure’, as he figuratively put it. Such demands frequently give problems to casting such operas today in particular tenor roles such as Mitridate. In this new Minkowski recording Michael Spyres, justly much admired for his singing of later music, in particular the heroes of Berlioz, proves to be no exception. While he is admirably authoritative and at times sensitive, the tessitura in an aria such as the heroic ‘Vado incontro’ (act 3) tests him to the limit, as can be readily heard in some of the less than pleasant sounds he makes above the stave. There is also too much continuous vibrato in the voice and some of his cadences are vulgarly ornamented. Since the latter (and one might almost say the same of the former) is a common problem throughout the set, one can only assume they were what Marc Minkowski wanted. Otherwise there are some satisfying performances, in particular those of Julie Fuch’s Aspasia and Elsa Dreisig’s Sifare, who are particularly sensitive in the lovers’ exchanges in act 2. Sabine Devieilhe brings a lovely, tender quality to the role of Ismene, a prototype for Ilia in Idomeneo. The generally stylish countertenor Paul-Antoine Bénos-Djian is an excellent Farnace, his performance reaching a fitting climax and attaining true nobility in act 3’s ‘Già dagli occhi’, a fine extended aria in which he renounces and repents his treachery. 

Minkowski’s direction is uneven, as so often with conductors today playing allegros too fast and slower tempos too slowly. This is particularly marked in act 1, with its preponderance of quick arias, almost without exception driven by the conductor in a manner that not infrequently sounds aggressive. Thereafter the approach allows for rather more nuance and sensitivity, and there is much to enjoy. Howeve, overall I think this performance too uneven to compete with the fine and certainly more idiomatic performance directed by Ian Page (Signum). Moreover Page’s version is obligatory for all serious Mozartians for its inclusion of a fourth CD devoted to variants of a number of the arias that show how much work Mozart put into satisfying both himself and his cast.

Brian Robins

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Recording

Jéliote, haute-contre de Rameau

Jéniote, haute-contre de Rameau (Mechelen)

Reinoud Van Mechelen, A nocte temporis
78:51
Alpha Classics Alpha 753

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CD booklets continue to amaze me, usually in a bad way. Here we have a recording (very good, by the way) in which the heroic tenor/haute-contre is also the musical director but he gets barely a line of credit and no biography. Fortunately Google can supply what Alpha denies us.

This recital surveys the career of Pierre de Jéliote, creator of more than 50 roles, interpreter of yet more, darling of the Opéra, all but indispensable to Rameau and one of the great singers of his day. The programme traces his career from Hippolyte et Aricie to Les Boréades and includes not only airs by Rameau but also by half a dozen of his contemporaries. And there is also an item by M. de Jéliote himself for, to quote the booklet, ‘in addition to being an accomplished musician, he was a composer too’.

This is some of the best singing of this repertoire that I have heard for a very long time. The high tessitura seems no problem to Reinoud Van Mechelen, whose tone is always sweet; he delivers the virtuosic passages with bravura; and overall he has the much-to-be-treasured good taste.

Even if the booklet (French and English) tells us nothing about him, we are at least well-informed about the inspiration for the project and the shaping of the programme, and the texts and translations are given in parallel columns. And a final shout-out for the orchestra, who give the singer unstinting and graceful support and enjoy the various overtures and dances scattered among the vocal tracks.

David Hansell

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Recording

Guillemain: Second livre de sonates en quatuor, œuvre XVII

Cover of Guillemain Second livre de sonates Ensemble la Française

Ensemble la Française
71:07
musica ficta MF8034

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Inspired by Telemann’s superb examples, a handful of French composers wrote quartets for the flute/violin/viol/bc combination. Guillemain, one of the most notable violinists of his day, actually wrote two sets, his Op.12 and then this set Op.17 (1756), elaborate re-workings of his Op.13 harpsichord and violin Pièces. He set out to create Conversations galantes et amusantes and absolutely succeeded in this aim. The music is endlessly engaging and there is a real sense of joy in the performances, particularly in the little moments where one instrument offers a musical contradiction to others already playing. And it’s not all froth. Lovers of counterpoint (like me!) will not be disappointed.

And the booklet gives us what we need in decent English (as well as its original French). Hallelujah!

David Hansell

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Recording

Charpentier: Messe à quatre chœurs H4

CD cover Charpentier Mass for 4 choirs

+Hersant: Cantique des trois enfants dans la fournaise
Maîtrise de Radio France, Les Pages, les Chantres & les Symphonistes du Centre de musique baroque de Versailles directed by Olivier Schnebeli & Sofie Jeannin
64:27
radio france FRF066

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When, in 2004, I was compiling M-AC tercentenary programmes this splendid mass was at the top of the wish-list, perhaps with a sense of ‘now or never’. It is likely that, other than in his head, the composer himself never heard it: if he did, it would most certainly have been in an acoustic that gave the singers a bit more help than they get from this auditorium, which produces a dry, almost soul-less sound. This is particularly the case where louder dynamics and higher pitches are concerned. The conductor has embellished the score by doubling each choir with contrasting instruments (violins/viols/reeds/brass – Charpentier mentions only violons) though has also de-embellished it by using only one organ as opposed to the composer’s hoped-for quartet and omitting the requested organ versets. But we do get an elevation motet – the Ave verum corpus H233.

Overall this was a tough listen. Some of the soloists sound uncomfortable in the style, there are some laboured ornaments, and the vocal blend and intonation in the tutti sections are not consistently good.

Hersant’s Cantique of 2013/14 is for the same forces as the Charpentier and is in a ‘tonally enriched’ idiom. I enjoyed it, but details are beyond the scope of EMR.

The booklet is poor. The Latin texts are translated into French, though the various essays are in French and English; the French text of the Cantique is given, but if there is a translation I couldn’t find it; and the English, where used, is unidiomatic. Disappointing all-round.

David Hansell