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Recording

J. S. Bach: Harpsichord Concertos

CD cover Bach Harpsichord Concertos Hanover Band Andrew Arthur

The Hanover Band, Andrew Arthur director and harpsichord
69:07
Signum Classics SIGCD 710

This fine first CD – the second will include the other three harpsichord concertos and Brandenburg V – was recorded in the admirable acoustic of St Nicholas, Arundel and uses a harpsichord by Andrew Garlick, built in 2009 and after Jean-Claude Goujon, 1748 and tuned in a 1/6 comma circulating meantone at A=415.

What is particularly good is the splendid balance between the single strings of the Hanover Band’s A team and the harpsichord – a resonant and singing instrument, well able to hold its own. What is very odd is that the experienced and skilled leader of the Hanover Band, Theresa Caudle, is not mentioned at all in the liner notes, which list the violin II, viola, violoncello, double bass and harpsichord together with details of their instruments. This reflects poorly on Signum’s production team.

It is now largely accepted that using single strings is the best way to balance these exquisite concerti, the majority of which had earlier lives as concerti for violin before being re-scored for a six-instrument ensemble for Bach’s concerts in Zimmermann’s coffee-house. The fascinating detail of their reworking for keyboard can be studied in NBA VII.4, where you can see how the articulation in the cembalo part frequently differs from the identical line in the first violin, as well as seeing how the left hand of the keyboard part often varies from the basso continuo part, with its suggestive flourishes frequently hinting at the polyphonic overtones of Bach’s writing. Sometimes, the articulation of the sections is enhanced by suppressing the 16’ in some parts, as in the Adagio of BWV 1054 where only a violoncello plays the continuo line.

But these subtleties aside, what is so beguiling about these performances is the absolute integration of the players with one another. Not one player fails to contribute and the way the first violin and the right hand of the harpsichord play in complete sync – even when negotiating slight inégales in the rhythms – is so elegant and makes for that fluidity which only one-to-a-part can give.

Although the excellent performance by Francesco Corti and Shunsuke Sato uses a second harpsichord to play the continuo of BWV 1055 for All-of-Bach, this marvellous performance beats it for natural clarity and for the way all the players – even when they appear to be just filling in the realisation of the continuo – shape their lines to make them sing in response to one other and to the free but perfectly rhythmic playing of Andrew Arthur.

This is not only a very ‘correct’ textbook version that I shall enjoy returning to for a long time, but it is fluid, inventive and utterly musical. You should get it, even if you have Conti’s performances with Il Pomo d’Oro. Andrew Arthur is not a soloist in the modern sense of the word – out to stamp his personality on this music: he is content to help the ensemble to listen to each other and above all, to listen to Bach. There are no grand gestures or extremes of tempi. This is the best we are likely to get and I look forward to the second CD immensely.

David Stancliffe

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Recording

Samâ-ï : Cosmopolitan Aleppo

CD cover samâ-ï cosmopolitan Aleppo

Canticum Novum, Emmanuel Bardon
73:20
Ambronay AMY060

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This haunting CD of music associated with the diverse cultures of Aleppo is charged with additional melancholy in light of the knowledge that this millennia-old city has in our own times been reduced to rubble. Canticum Novum, a large ensemble incorporating voices and traditional instruments such as the oud, duduk, nyckelharpa, zurna, ney and kaval as well as conventional early instruments such as viol, lute and triple harp, invokes the rich musical cultures of a city which has stood at a cultural crossroads for five millennia. Emmanuel Bardon, who drew the ensemble together in 1996, has consciously mixed world music and early music ethoses in an effort to access this sometimes nebulous and ancient repertoire. If this music and these performances lack the academic credentials we would normally expect of European early music recordings, like Jordi Savall, Christina Pluhar and a growing number of fine musicians searching outside Europe and in more remote centuries, Bardon relies on instinct and musicality to breathe life into this music. The result is a wonderfully atmospheric evocation of an eastern metropolis renowned for its diversity and tolerance, qualities which may recently have been bombed into extinction.

D. James Ross

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Recording

Piani: 12 Sonate a Violino solo

CD cover Piani 12 Sonate a Violino solo Mencattini Labirinto Armonico

Pierluigi Mencattini, Labirinto Armonico
133:38 (2 CDs in a single jewel case)
Tactus TC 671690

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These two CDs present Giovanni Antonio Piani’s opus 1 set of 12 sonatas for solo violin and continuo printed in Paris in 1712. Piani moved from Italy to Paris in 1704 as part of the interest there in the Italian style and moves to integrate it with the native French taste. This set is the only surviving music by Piani, who went on to have a glittering career as a violin virtuoso, moving in 1721 to Vienna where he enjoyed considerable celebrity until at least 1757. Perhaps the main interest in these sonatas is the degree to which the composer manages to meld the Italian and French styles, a near obsession at the time. There are certainly elements of both flavours in Piani’s music. I have a couple of reservations about these recordings – where Piani states very clearly his very simple vision of their performance by a solo violin with cello and harpsichord continuo, the present performance draws in a whole menagerie of other instruments including double bass, archlute, organ and even a tambourine! A complete recording of twelve sonatas may suggest some liberty be taken with instrumentation in the interests of variety, but adding percussion may represent a red line. I also found the sonatas, whether due to the rather workaday playing of soloist Pierluigi Mencattini or Piani’s limited compositional skills, frankly a little predictable and dull.

D. James Ross

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Recording

Cello Concertos from Northern Germany

CD cover Cello Concertos from Northern Germany Ensemble Diderot Gulrim Choï

Gulrim Choï, Ensemble Diderot
64:13
Audax Records ADX11200

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Ensemble Diderot’s exploration of pre-classical German music has recently focussed on the culturally dynamic city of Berlin, and these four attractive cello concertos, two of which are receiving world premiere recordings, certainly deserve a place in our understanding of it. The most famous composer represented here, probably due to his later move to London, is gamba virtuoso, composer and Bach pupil, Carl Friedrich Abel, indeed the only one of the four composers here that I have previously come across. By contrast, Ignác Frantisek Mara, Markus Heinrich Grauel and Johann Wilhelm Hertel have been treated less kindly by posterity, sinking into relative neglect. In these characterful performances by cellist Gulrim Choï, the quirky originality of all four composers becomes evident. It is interestingly in the slow movements of their cello concertos that their individuality becomes most apparent, but these are remarkably accomplished works full of musical inspiration. I often feel that the music from the melting pot of the pre-classical period, with its heady ethos of exploration and experimentation, is more interesting and exciting than that of the more settled classical period itself, and this is very much the case here. Combining technical assurance and an engaging sense of adventure, all four composers represented have something valuable to say, and Choï and the Diderot Ensemble give them vivid and eloquent expression here.

D. James Ross

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Recording

Ockeghem: Masses 2

CD cover Ocheghem Masses 2 the sound and the fury

the sound and the fury
53:19
fra bernardo fb2122007

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The label Fra Bernardo specializes in some wonderful vocal music from the Franco-Flemish school, sung by ensembles with self-consciously eccentric names, on discs that are encased in packaging usually fronted by illustrations of half-naked men and only slightly less naked women, in expressive (contrived, contorted, whimsical, postmodern, amusing, idiotic – according to taste) postures, ostensibly conducting music by the likes of Ockeghem and Gombert.

The Sound and the Fury (TSATF) are four fellows – David Erler, John Potter, Colin Mason and Richard Wistreich, respectively CT T B B – and this recording, released earlier this year, was made in 2010. Their previous recording of masses by Ockeghem was released in 2013. Strangely they are in competition with another of Fra Bernardo’s ensembles with a whacky moniker, Beauty Farm, who have recorded their own selection of Ockeghem’s masses over three discs, including the two under review here (Fra Bernardo FB1909373, surprisingly the only other currently listed version of the striking Missa Ecce ancilla Domini though a fine version two to a part by The Clerks’ Group on Proudsound PROU CD 133 has been deleted). Given the unarguably stratospheric quality of Ockeghem’s masses, the question of recommending the current disc comes down to the quality of the performance and of the recording. TSATF have a warmer vocal sound than Beauty Farm in their recordings of these two masses, less strident and more considered in their interpretations. The recording venue, Mauerbach Charterhouse Church, in Austria, has a noticeable but not distracting resonance, and TSATF adopt tempi that renders every note clearly audible. This pays off in, for instance, the Credo of Missa My my where the steady tempo is able comfortably to accommodate the syncopations that occur in the latter half of the movement, without any sense of haste and also without any detriment to the clarity of the notes.

The quality of the music in both masses is of the highest order, as one would expect of Ockeghem. Missa My my is based on Ockeghem’s own chanson Presque transi. This can be heard on Cut Circle’s double album of Ockeghem’s complete songs (Musique en Wallonie MEW1995) which I reviewed favourably for Early Music Review on 15 October 2020, referring to this song expressing “downright depression” – a compliment in the context! Missa Ecce ancilla Domini is based on a segment of the antiphon Missus est angelus Gabriel. Sung as well as this, these masses can of course be listened to as superior background music, but it is also most rewarding to engage closely with the music: it is not essential to have profound musicological or mathematical knowledge to appreciate that it has been created by a remarkable intelligence, an experience which is in itself rewarding, but by an intelligence that is capable of creating beauty as well as satisfying musical structures. The subtle change of harmonic gear in the Agnus of Missa My my from the final “peccata mundi” to “Dona nobis pacem” illustrates this beauty perfectly, while the striking phrase used to open the movements lacking an intonation illustrates both beauty and structural eloquence. There can of course be more than one ideal interpretation of music as fine as this. TSATF provides one such interpretation, a superb performance to complement superb music.

Richard Turbet

Categories
Recording

Nürnberger Lautenschläger

CD cover Nürnberger Lautenschläger Magnus Andersson

 Virtuoso Lute Music from Nuremberg
Magnus Andersson lute
66:02
Klanglogo KL2537

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This interesting CD is an anthology of renaissance lute music from 16th-century Germany. It begins with music by Adolf Blindhamer (c.1450-c.1531), who was lutenist to the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I (1459 – 1519). It is possible that Blindhamer is one of the lutenists depicted in the well-known set of woodcuts known as “The Triumphs of Maximilian”. Impressive is Magnus Andersson’s performance of Blindhamer’s jolly Nach-Dancz to Ach Betler, which bounces along with a steady foot-tapping beat, and is not held back by the exceedingly fast flurries of notes which appear from time to time.

There is much interesting information about the composers, the sources of their music, and their connection with Nuremberg, to be found in John Robinson’s liner notes. Blindhamer was awarded citizenship of Nuremberg. One of his pupils may have been Hans Gerle (c.1500-1554), whose books of lute music were published in Nuremberg. Andersson plays four pieces from them, including a particularly attractive setting of T’Andernaken, which he sustains well with effective contrasts of tone.

Nuremberg was the home of Hans Newsidler (c.1508/9-63), who busied himself producing six books of lute music and at least 18 children. Andersson plays three of Newsidler’s intabulations: Tartara by Heinrich Isaac similar in style to T’andernaken, a sober Sancta Trinitas by Antoine de Févin, and a bright Cum sancto spiritu by Josquin des Prez. All three pieces are from Newsidler’s Der Ander Theil des Lautenbuchs (1536), which contains harder, more extensive pieces than those in his first book which was aimed at beginners. Ornate figuration is a feature of the intabulations in Der Ander Theil, but Andersson does not let the apparently mindless divisions obscure the musical integrity of the original.

There follows a Passamezzo and Saltarello pair by one of Hans Newsidler’s lute-playing sons, Conrad Newsidler (1541-1603). The divisions, which have interesting chromatic inflections, float over a static bass, which eventually moves to create some pleasing harmonic clashes. The Passamezzo and Saltarello should be contrasting movements, so I would have preferred to hear the Saltarello played a little faster. In contrast are two short sacred pieces set by Conrad Newsidler, which plod along as do so many Lutheran hymns.

Conrad’s older brother, Melchior Newsidler (1531-c.1595), was an exceptionally skilled lutenist. His Recercar Primo is a particularly fine piece of counterpoint, slow-moving, with unexpected changes of direction, rather like Bakfark on a good day. The CD comes to a peaceful end with Melchior Newsidler’s intabulation of Bewahr mich Herr, over seven minutes long.

The organist and composer Hans Leo Hassler (1564-1612) was born in Nuremberg. Andersson plays two canzonas by Hassler which appear in a lute book owned by one Michael Eysertts (c.1580-after 1600), who lived in Nuremberg. It is not clear who made the intabulations, so Eysertts’ contribution may have been no more than owning a book.

Andersson uses three lutes built by Lars Jönsson, which are strung in gut with strings from Aquila and Kürschner. There is a tendency for treble notes to be louder and brighter than those lower down, which is probably more to do with a sound engineer’s switch than the luthier or string-makers. Unfortunately, there are a fair few squeaks and other extraneous noises coming from the strings. That, together with an echoey acoustic makes me wonder if the microphone was placed a bit too close to the lute for the recording.

Stewart McCoy

Categories
Recording

Battle Cry: She speaks

CD cover Battle Cry She speaks Helen Charlston Toby Carr

Helen Charlston mezzo-soprano, Toby Carr theorbo
57:20
Delphian DCD34283

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Since she won the London Handel singing competition in 2018, mezzo Helen Charlston has increasingly shown herself to be on the verge of stardom that seems likely to extend far beyond these shores. This solo CD, her second, provides ample reasons why. She starts with the advantage of a voice that not only owns to rich tonal warmth at times reminiscent of the outstanding French mezzo Lucille Richardot, but one at all times beautifully produced across its range. Cantabile lines are drawn with unfailing security, while attention to text – one of Charlston’s great not to say rare strengths among today’s singers – allows her to colour and weight her voice highly effectively and with real musical insight.

Such qualities are of course much needed attributes in a recital that concentrates on 17th-century repertoire in general and includes seconda prattica works (two Barbara Strozzi songs and Monteverdi’s ‘Lamento d’Arianna’). In addition, Charlston performs Battle Cry, a short song cycle commissioned for her from the composer Owain Park and the poet Georgia Way. The programme is intelligently planned largely symmetrically, beginning and ending with Purcell, incorporating theorbo solos and placing the Park cycle at its heart. As the mention of the Monteverdi and Strozzi may suggest, its underlying theme is the suffering of women, a topic carried through into the new work and finally alleviated only marginally by Purcell’s ‘An Evening Hymn’. Mercifully no agenda is suggested, though it may be felt that just a little light relief might have been welcome, especially as the CD’s playing time is short by contemporary standards.   

In his notes Jeremy Summerly makes the astonishing assertion that ‘The Baroque Era in music made a virtue of pigeon-holing styles and approaches to musical composition and performance’, citing rationalised national styles. Even leaving to one side the fact that pigeon-holing is a near entirely 20th/21st-century phenomenon, the exact opposite is true. Here, for example, does ‘Dido’s Lament’ – an infinitely touching, simply expressed performance with the subtlest of ornamentation – belong to a part of an English tradition? No, of course it doesn’t. It wouldn’t exist without Monteverdi’s ‘Lamento della ninfa’ and neither would many other 17th-century works by Italian, French, German and English composers. The ‘Lamento’ is in Charlston’s repertoire so it’s perhaps somewhat surprising that it’s not included. But, as noted above, we do get the rather meatier ‘Lamento d’Arianna’ in a performance that is beautifully judged, excellently articulated in a way that captures the emotional ebb and flow of the music, its building and release of tension to near perfection. All this is underpinned by the key reiteration of the words, ‘Teseo, o Teseo mio’, heartbreakingly delivered by Charlston.  Strozzi’s ‘La travagliata’ builds to a sensuous final verse in which the last line here turns from pleading to a hint of anger, an interesting and unexpected interpretive twist.

I’m afraid I don’t listen to enough contemporary music to provide expert comment on Battle Cry, which includes four songs. However, it seems to have been written to Charlton’s strengths, displaying them effectively. Much the longest of the songs is the last, ‘Marietta’, which is not only to my mind the best of them as to both music and the somewhat enigmatic text, but interestingly was written some time before its companions. Here the use of portamento among other facets makes reminders of Britten seem unavoidable. The third song, ‘A singer’s ode to Sappho’ is unaccompanied.

And turning to accompaniments, it would be wrong not to acknowledge fully the part played in the success of the recital by theorbist Toby Carr, whose playing not only admirable supports the singer throughout but whose technique and admirable warmth of tone provide a timely reminder that the theorbo is not the percussion instrument we today hear far too frequently, but a deeply expressive melodic instrument. On his own account, he plays two brief pieces by Robert de Visée.

An outstanding achievement and a richly rewarding experience for the listener.

Brian Robins

Categories
Recording

Schütz: Dafne

CD cover Schütz Dafne Roland Wilson

La Capella Ducale, Musica Fiata, Roland Wilson
75:15
cpo 555 494-2

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Readers of reviews on a site devoted to early music are likely to know something of the history of Schütz’s Dafne, an “opera” performed for the wedding festivities of the daughter of his employer the Elector of Saxony in 1627. Given at the castle theatre in Torgau it then disappeared and remains lost. Given Schütz’s place as the greatest of German 17th-century composers, the notion of a lost  Schütz opera has of course long intrigued music historians, but so far as I’m aware this is the first time anyone has attempted to reconstruct Dafne.

The word opera appeared in the opening sentence in inverted commas advisedly, since there is some debate as to whether or not Dafne can be termed an opera. New Grove Opera thinks not: ‘Dafne, Zwo Comoedian and Orpheo und Euridice (two other lost dramas of Schütz) are spoken plays with vocal inserts, usually in the form of strophic lieder’. Roland Wilson disagrees, making the apparently reasonable point that if Schütz was not writing an opera why would he turn to an adaptation (made by Martin Opitz) of an Italian libretto by Rinuccini that had already been set as operas by Peri (in 1597) and Marco da Gagliano (1607). Wilson points out that Opitz’s rather dismissive comments about the piece stemmed from the fact that he did not understand recitative, himself missing the point that no German drama of this period employed anything other than spoken dialogue. I strongly suspect that what Wilson has set as recitar cantando would have remained spoken dialogue

Wilson’s methodology fundamentally involves setting the libretto to other works of Schütz he believes to have some relevance, though his working methods are not clearly set out. It goes without saying that any assessment of Wilson’s reconstruction is going to involve subjective views, hopefully informed by such points as that made in the previous paragraph. I have immediately to say that I remain unconvinced both by his arguments and the aural results. Opitz’s libretto casts the work as a prologue (declaimed in recitative by Ovid, from whose Metamorphosis the story of Dafne and Apollo is taken) and five brief acts, thus suggesting Monteverdi’s Orfeo, on which Wilson leans heavily in various ways, often wrongly in my opinion, especially as to instrumentation. There is a strong sense of symmetry, each act ending with a madrigalian chorus for the three shepherds, in one case augmented by a soprano. All these choruses –and many of the solo lieder – are cast in extended strophic form and it is a fatal flaw of the performance that there is little or no convincing attempt to vary the verses, as would certainly have been the case with 17th-century performers. Many of Wilson’s choices as to instrumentation and its deployment also strike me as highly questionable. His use of wind and brass is surely far too extensive for a work of this kind, the solemnly lugubrious trombone chords that open act 1, for example, more suggestive of a scene in Hades than an introduction by the shepherds to Apollo’s slaying of the Python. More importantly, and a-historically, instruments not infrequently mask voices, either as continuo that frequently reminds the listener of a ‘flock of noisy sparrows’, to borrow the composer and theorist Agostino Agazzari’s delightful phrase, or, worse, melodically, as in act 2 where Cupid is at one point drowned out by cornetti.

The singers are competent enough, but none show much awareness of the principles of ‘prima le parole poi la musica’ that form the basis of the seconda prattica, leaving some of the extensive passages of recitative lacking any sense of dramatic articulation and, frankly, often being tedious. I’m sorry to sound so negative about a brave project to which Wilson has obviously devoted much time and energy. Others may well be less concerned about some of the historical points raised and should perhaps investigate the disc for themselves.

Brian Robins

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News

The proof of the pudding

Amazon earnings 2022

THIS SITE has been live for seven years now. In that time, I have spent literally hundreds (possibly thousands?) of pounds, paying for web space, and mailing CDs, DVDs and books to reviewers, as well as MANY thousands of hours, uploading reviews, tracking down images of the products, and all the mundane bureaucratic stuff that goes into such a venture. In return – in the year to date – you can see above that the site has generated the princely sum of £11.53 from Amazon, the only loyalty scheme that we operate. It should not come as any surprise that it is vastly disappointing to me that the time freely given by our generous critics for your enlightenment goes largely unrewarded and that I am (once again) wondering if – at a time in my life when there are other (much more intellectually stimulating) things to which I would rather devote myself – there is any point in continuing to waste time, energy and money.

If anyone would like to take over the site, please contact us: bc16661 (at) hotmail (dot) co (dot) com

Otherwise, the domain will expire at the end of its current contract with Ionos.

Brian Clark

 

 

Categories
Recording

Elizabethan Organ Music

CD cover Elizabethan organ music Leonhardt

Gustav Leonhardt at the Schnitger organ, Zwolle, Holland
Paradizo PA0019
48:34

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For goodness’ sake do not do what I initially did, and dismissively assume that this is another re-hash of Leonhardt’s greatest hits. It is a unique recording, it is an historically significant recording, it is a superb recording, and anyone with an interest in early keyboard music will be delighted that this recording has been resurrected and made generally accessible. As Skip Sempé explains in the booklet, it was originally made for a niche American recording company in the spring of 1962, in a pressing of only a few hundred copies, available only in the USA. Now anyone and everyone can buy it, and the quality of the music and of the performances makes this a cause for rejoicing.

Sempé states that Leonhardt subsequently re-recorded only three of these eleven pieces: two for harpsichord and one for organ. The two harpsichord works are Farnaby’s Fantasia, and Gibbons’ Fantasia MB XX/6, both currently on Philips 4381532. The third re-recording that I have traced is Byrd’s Clarifica me pater III (on the CD it retains the superceded title that was current back in 1962) which Leonhardt plays on the claviorgan (Alpha 073); either Sempé has taken this performance to be on an actual organ, or I have missed a commercial recording of one of these pieces, played on an organ by Leonhardt. Either way, this is a release additionally to be treasured for these unique renditions by Leonhardt of eight fine Elizabethan pieces.

The organ which Leonhardt uses is in San-Michaelskerk, Zwolle, Netherlands, built by Arp and Frans Caspar Schnitger, 1721. Some Elizabethan music ostensibly composed for the virginals or harpsichord can sound strident at one extreme or reedy, even weedy, at the other when played on early organs. The Zwolle instrument sounds beautiful, though it does of course date from over a century after the repertory on this disc was composed. The choice of music is excellent, intermingling folk material with the rigours of plainsong fantasias, and free fantasias (and a prelude) with the discipline of a ground. The fantasias by Byrd and Philips are particularly well chosen, not only because they are both masterful compositions, but also because Philips, a pupil of Byrd, uses the same theme as his teacher. Their respective working out of the material makes for an enthralling comparison.

These compositions from a golden age are performed superbly. Leonhardt had a particular respect for Byrd, and there is the added frisson in hearing works of the first great composer for the keyboard being played by arguably the greatest modern performer on early keyboard instruments: it would be hard to imagine finer performances of either piece. The same can be said of the other nine pieces. Whether you own one, some, most, all, or none of these tracks, this is a recording that simply recommends itself: it is a major discographical event.

Richard Turbet