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Lettres en musique
Anne Marie Dragosits
74:00
L’Encelade ECL2402

From its first explosive entry on this CD in music by Claude Balbastre, the clavecin by Christian Kroll of 1770 from the Collection François Badout, Fondation du Sautereau, Neuchâtel establishes itself as an instrument demanding our attention. At full volume, it has a huge voice, but is also capable of much more subtle and gentle utterances. Anne Marie Dragosits certainly puts it through its paces and timbres in music by a selection of largely unfamiliar French composers of the 18th century. The inspirations of the CD are the characters in Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s 1782 troubling novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses, to whose letters Dragosits attaches the music. Although this idea is an intriguing one, a linking device of this sort is not really needed from my perspective as a framework for music that more than stands on its own two feet. However, fans of the novel or the ensuing films will undoubtedly enjoy the music as a soundtrack to the various ongoing intrigues of the plot. What is striking musically is the unerringly high standard of the music, regardless of the obscurity of its composer, and Anne Marie Dragosits and her Kroll clavecin are its ideal advocates.

D. James Ross

Robert Costin
79:47
firsthandrecords FHR 173

These accounts of five of CPE Bach’s Wq 70 Sonatas with a selection of fillers for mechanical clock by Haydn and Mozart are played by Robert Costin on the organ of Sherborne Abbey. Originally built in 1856, this Gray & Davison instrument has undergone extensive adaptation over the years, including having its mechanism adapted to electro-pneumatic action and back again to purely mechanical action! Built over fifty years after the deaths of the featured composers, it doesn’t seem like an obvious choice for this repertoire, and it seems unlikely that the classical period composers would have had anything like the choice or types of stops available to Robert Costin. In this respect we are very much in the player’s hands regarding the appropriateness of the timbres he has chosen, and I have to say I am not always entirely persuaded of the authenticity of the sounds chosen here – exacerbated by the generous acoustic, this recording sometimes sounds to me like a Victorian interpretation of classical period music, often sounding a little bit overblown, like later ‘improvements’ on the scores of Handel and Bach. The CD notes suggest an association with Princess Anna Amalia of Prussia, sister of CPE Bach’s patron, Frederick the Great, and a musician and composer in her own right, who had an organ installed in her living room in the same year as Bach published his Sonatas. While Bach’s music would also have been intended to meet the growing demands of the concert hall, I think that this inventive music would sound much more effective with the focussed timbres of a smaller instrument. This mismatch of material and instrument comes even more into focus in the slighter repertoire for mechanical clocks, which concludes the CD. While I would personally have preferred the sounds of a less portentous instrument for these Bach Sonatas, Robert Costin plays with refinement and elegance, and we are given a very full account of the details of the chosen instrument. Incidentally, the first of the Bach Sonatas is omitted as it does not appear in the composer’s catalogue – this seems an odd decision as this missing sonata would clearly have completed the set of six Sonatas and filled the CD without resorting to the unrelated and more trivial music for mechanical clock.

D. James Ross

The Brook Street Band
83:44
First Hand Records FHR188

Joseph Gibbs was lucky enough to have been painted by his friend and fellow musician Thomas Gainsborough, a fine portrait reproduced in this CD case, while the programme notes by Tatty Theo, the group’s cellist, perhaps rather ungenerously suggest that it is this association with greatness that has saved Gibbs’ music from obscurity. In fact, although he lived to the ripe old age of 89, he only seems to have published one further collection of music, a set of quartets, and remained a composer of only parochial importance. This seems a shame as these opus 1 Sonatas seem much more than merely competent, and in these sympathetic and imaginative performances by the Brook Street Band they emerge as fine compositions in their own right. The group’s violinist Rachel Harris brings her extensive understanding of the music of this period to bear on Gibbs’ felicitous melodic lines and rhetorical phrases to bring out his unique musical voice. It seems sad that the compositional potential of these promising works was never really fulfilled – perhaps the highly competitive milieu of London at the time, which produced so many masterpieces, was something which Gibbs chose to avoid, preferring local celebrity to an international reputation. In any case, it is lovely to have some fine music persuasively played as a soundtrack to Gainsborough’s vivid portrait of his friend.

D. James Ross

I Fagiolini, dir. Robert Hollingworth

70:17

Coro COR16208

For many, the name Orazio Benevoli (1605-1672) will be more associated with a work he did not compose than with those he did. For long believed to be the composer of the famous 53-part Missa Salzburgiensis, the authorship of that work has in more recent times become firmly ascribed to Heinrich Biber. Nonetheless, Benevoli was the composer of a number of large-scale multi-choir works that fall into a well-established Roman tradition of polychoral music sometimes designated Colossal Baroque. The present recording is the second of three CDs I Fagiolini are devoting to Benevoli’s masses for four choirs.

The Missa Benevola, also known as Missa Maria Prodigio Celeste, may, the booklet note suggests, have been composed for the feast of the Assumption (15 August) during Benevoli’s tenure as maestro at S Maria Maggiore in Rome from 1646 until his death. Scored for 16 solo voices supported by instruments, the mass makes its considerable effect by means of contrasting almost chamber music-like textures with passages, usually climaxes, of overwhelming power that remind us that if it was anything Colossal Baroque is pure counter-Reformation theatre. Throughout these passages and the build-up to them are quite superbly handled by Robert Hollingworth. At the other extreme is the sheer lyrical beauty of, for example, Kyrie I, which opens with the soprano’s long melismatic lines intricately interwoven. Christe equally involves the upper voices interweaving in gentle, but at times sensuous textures, another example of the intrusion of the secular world into the sacred in the service of the counter-Reformation. More unusually, it is the high voices that are also given the heart of Credo, ‘Et incarnatus est’ and ‘Crucifixus’, the latter eschewing the expected darker texture for luminescence, while ‘Et resurrexit’ brings lively dance-like rhythms. Agnus Dei rounds the setting off with prayful, largely syllabic writing that introduces some harmonic surprises before being brought to a final glorious climax. The performance of this fine mass is beautifully balanced and exceptionally accomplished, the voices excellently tuned. The dispersal of the choirs is not spectacular; a glance at the promotional YouTube video – well worth a watch – shows they were not that distanced. It is worth noting that S Maria Maggiore does not have the kind of balconies employed for polychoral music by Venetian composers. I found listening through headphones separates the choirs more effectively.

Each of the three recordings is designed to complement the featured Benevoli mass with works by another composer, here Benevoli’s near-exact contemporary Giacomo Carissimi (1605-1674), represented by two motets preserved in sources in Uppsala (Sweden). Paratum, cor meum, which has an obbligato violin part, is for soprano or bass, here well, if slightly too reservedly sung by Frederick Long, while the more ambitious Super flumina Babylonis is scored for four voices and continuo, its contrasts of mood and, at times, virtuoso demands both well met.

Finally the work by which Carissimi is best known today, the Latin oratorio Jephte, composed for the German College, one of the most significant musical establishments in Baroque Rome, in 1648. Relating the tragic story of Jephtha’s vow to God to sacrifice the first person he meets – it transpires to be his only daughter – in return for victory against the Ammonites, the oratorio concludes with an extraordinary lament for the unnamed Daughter, a few minutes of music that must be among the most influential ever composed. But the whole oratorio is a remarkable piece of drama that includes a change of mood as stark as that of the Messenger’s arrival in Monteverdi’s Orfeo at the point Jephtha realises it is his own daughter he must sacrifice. The performance is excellent, with particular kudos going to baritone Greg Skidmore’s superbly sung and dramatically compelling Jephte. Julia Doyle’s Daughter is scarcely less impressive, an intensely moving, if arguably marginally understated portrayal. My one reservation would be to question the addition of tympani and percussion to underlay the Daughter’s first words, ‘Start the beating of tambourines and the striking of cymbals’, obviously illustrative (too obviously illustrative?), but which more seriously masks the singer. But overall this is an exceptional CD, and I look forward greatly to the last of the trilogy.

Brian Robins

Ensemble 1684, conducted by Gregor Meyer
73:24
cpo 555 657-2

The unusual career of Saxon-born Johann Rosenmüller (1619-1684) was shaped by a dramatic non-musical incident that occurred in 1655. In May that year, he was arrested in Leipzig, where he was building a career as an outstandingly gifted musician, and accused of pederasty with one of the boys of the Thomasschule, where he was tutoring. Following escape from prison, Rosenmüller fled to Hamburg, from where he made his way to Venice, remaining there until he finally returned to Germany shortly before his death in 1684. It was his near 30-year sojourn coupled with an earlier stay in Venice in the 1640s that laid the foundations that would forge Rosenmüller’s unique place in German Baroque music history. His adoption of Italian style, already in part apparent in the music of Schütz, would henceforth change German sacred music in the wake of the devastation of the Thirty Years War (1618-1648).

The present CD is a varied collection featuring both large-scale and more intimate sacred works. Among the more extended works are two Vespers psalms belonging to the composer’s Venetian years, a relatively modestly scored Dixit Dominus in four parts with strings and continuo and a larger 8-part setting of Laetatus sum with cornetti and trombones in addition to strings. Both feature the colourful contrasts of texture and interplay familiar from the sacred music of Monteverdi and his contemporary compatriots, with vocal scoring that features strong contrasts between favoriten (soloists) and the capell (full choir). Also designed on an elaborate scale is the German-language setting based on Psalm 147, Preise, Jerusalem in six parts and also including brass and strings. In addition, two brief sacred chamber-music concertos of the kind familiar from Schütz’s output and one of the Sonatas for strings from the collection published in 1682 make for intelligent contrast.

I’ve so far omitted one other large-scale work because it leads helpfully to consideration of the performances. In some ways it is the most remarkable work on the CD, not least because of its extraordinary non-biblical German text by Rosenmuller’s friend Caspar Ziegler on which it is based. Entsetze dich, Natur is known from a surviving print of the text to have been performed on Christmas Day in 1649. The elaborate scoring for six voices, cornetti and strings is used throughout this long concerto setting to arresting affect in a cyclical structure with two alternating ritornellos. The whole effect is as strikingly colourful as the metaphors employed in Ziegler’s text. The setting of such a lengthy text is largely syllabic – reminiscent of Schütz – and without any great degree of repetition, relying substantially on the kind of powerful rhetoric that opens the poem – ‘Tremble, Nature: all must change for you, God Himself becomes a man’.

It is certainly an extreme example but the tame delivery of this opening heard here is sadly typical of the basic problem I have with the present performances. They are neat, tidy and well-executed, the voices featured – with particularly ‘white’ sopranos – are capable and have good technique. But it is all so tame. Take the delivery of that stunning opening line of Entsetze dich, Natur with its pregnant pauses. It positively demands to be communicated with a strong sense of declamation. Much the same applies throughout the disc, though some of the full choral passages make a fine effect. But in general the singing here reminds me strongly of much earlier days of the early music revival, when what was sought was clarity and purity, a cleansing escape from the excesses of romanticism, but I believe we’ve increasingly come to recognise that escape was at the expense of expressive interpretation. Cantus Cölln (harmonia mundi) have recorded Entsetze dich, Natur in an expressive performance that does it more justice (as part of a conjectural Rosenmüller Weihnachtshistorie), although even there I feel there is the opportunity to convey a greater sense of the text’s inherent rhetoric.

I’ve perhaps been a little unkind to these thoroughly honest performances so obviously born of integrity. But conductors like Stéphane Fuget are showing us dramatically that we have surely now moved on from performing early music solely from the perspective of decent respect?

Brian Robins