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Vivaldi incognito

CD cover of Vivaldi-Incognito

Hexaton, Guillaume Rebinguet Sudre
60:00
Encelade ECL 2302

Whatever the artistic merits of this recording (and I do not deny that Hexaton and its violinist, Guillaume Rebinguet Sudre, are outstanding artists), there are elements of the project itself that I find baffling. The recital does not consist of some freshly discovered works, but rather three sonatas from the “Manchester” manuscript (two of which also survive in the Saxon State Library in Dresden), and another from that German repository which was copied out by Johann Georg Pisendel – Konzertmeister of the renowned Hofkapelle in Dresden under Augustus the Strong, and a pupil of the Red Priest. It is odd (I think) that the booklet notes do not mention that RV6 (the Dresden manuscript of which is online HERE) is headed “Suonata a Solo fatta per Mr Pisendel”, or that Pisendel himself wrote the second source of RV12 (online HERE). The third Pisendel-related sonata RV10 (see his manuscript HERE) is similarly in the German’s handwriting… In the booklet note, the first movement of RV10 is listed as “(Preludio a Capriccio)”, as if there is no heading in the original – it is clearly marked “Suonata All[egr]o:”.

So much for the musicology. Now to the music. To be fair, in a live performance, these might be terrifically exciting. The violinist certainly has flair, and his exuberance is echoed by the continuo team of cello, theorbo and harpsichord. While I am mostly open-minded about whether or not a particular instrument might have been involved in an 18th-century performance (how can we ever be sure that certain combinations really were frowned upon?), I struggled here – especially in slow movements – with the competition for my ears’ attention! The violinist went full William Babell on his rapid octave scale ornaments, while the harpsichordist and lutenist spread chords, flew all over their respective ranges (even when the manuscript is clearly marked “Tasto solo”!), and even picked out some (unfigured) dissonant notes at cadences (I’m talking about the horrendous B flat in the antepenultimate bar of RV10’s opening movement!)

And then there are what, for wont of a better word, I shall call “the fillers”… Presumably unable to find any pieces by other incognito composers for solo harpsichord and theorbo, the violinist composed his own.* Even though they are relatively short, and might be adjudged to be reasonable pastiches, why on earth not champion some real neglected works by some of Vivaldi’s contemporaries? Surely this would have been an ideal opportunity (given that the CD is only 60 minutes long) to promote some obscure Venetian(s)? And what did the poor cellist do that meant he didn’t get a new piece and instead had to make do with the slow movement of one of Vivaldi’s concerti?

As I say, there are many things here to enjoy. I found that repeated listening – instead of broadening my mind – convinced me even more that the soundscape is too busy for too much of the time. They are violin sonatas after all, not sonatas for violin with a competing backing group…

Brian Clark

*As if to prove that he IS the Baroque man, Rebinguet Sudre also built the harpsichord!

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Recording

Gregor Werner Vol. 4

CD cover Werner Caldara vol. 4 Rovatkay

Voktett Hannover, la festa musicale, Lajos Rovatkay
59:41
audite 97.833

For the fourth volume of this excellent series, director-cum-musicologist Lajos Rovatkay has chosen to focus on Gregor Joseph Werner’s relationship with his teacher, Vice-Kapellmeister to the Viennese court, Antonio Caldara. As well as tracing the birth of the two-movement church sonata from sinfonie to the elder composer’s oratorios to an excellent sonata a4  by the pupil, it compares and contrasts their church music, culminating in a performance of a Requiem in G minor by “Werner”, which Rovatkay identified as featuring music by both composers (whether with or without the permission/knowledge of the teacher is not made explicit in one of the densest booklet notes I have ever read… faced with such an impenetrable text, I’m not surprised that even a highly skilled translator like Viola Scheffel struggled to save us from some of its obscurity!)

All eleven (!) singers of the Voktett Hannover (only one tenor and one bass sing on all the vocal tracks) are excellent; they blend beautifully and take the solos stylishly though I did long occasionally for some ornamentation when the dense counterpoint (for which both composers are rightly famed) allowed. Similarly, the string playing (33211 strings with chamber organ and lute) is stylish – nicely pointed bow strokes give the contrapuntal lines shape.

At a little under an hour, some might feel hard done by. However, with music of this quality (speaking as a self-confessed lover of fugal writing), I feel this is just about right. I also found myself hearing pieces of a musical jigsaw falling into place, hearing echoes of Legrenzi (reputedly Caldara’s Venetian teacher) and foretastes of Haydn (who followed Werner as Kapellmeister at Esterházy). It is remarkable that audite has thusfar produced four outstanding CDs of music by a relatively unknown composer and I for one hope there are more in the pipeline!

Brian Clark

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Recording

Francesco Scarlatti: Il Daniele nel lago de’ leoni

CD cover Francesco Scarlatti Il Daniele Armonico Consort Christopher Monks

Armonico Consort, directed by Christopher Monks
61:46
Signum SIGCD 881

While the Scarlattis were not quite able to match the Bachs as a family music business, they were nonetheless pretty industrious. Francesco Scarlatti was one of seven younger siblings of the greatest of them, Alessandro (adherents of Domenico need not write in!). He was born in Palermo, Sicily in 1666 and studied in Naples, where he subsequently joined the Royal Court orchestra, doubtless owing the post to his elder brother, who became maestro di capella in 1684. In 1691 he moved back to Palermo and then – after a brief period in Vienna – to London (in 1719), where his name appears in concert programmes, as it does in Dublin, where Francesco Scarlatti died around 1741. Although little is known of his activities in either city, it appears likely that he worked mainly in theatre orchestras.

Francesco is known to have composed a comic opera, Lo Petrachio, and four sacred dramas. Two of these were Latin works performed in Rome in 1699 and 1710 respectively and two Italian, of which one, La profetessa guerriera, was performed in a convent in Naples in 1703. The other, Daniele nel lago de’ leoni is the only one of the four to survive but paradoxically it is not known for whom it was written nor its place of performance, although it was almost certainly Palermo or Naples. Daniele conforms closely to the style of the Italian late 17th-century sacred drama or oratorio often for didactic purposes featuring a colourful Old Testament story related by both biblical and allegorical characters but without recourse to a narrator. In Sicily this kind of oratorio was well established in the works of Michelangelo Falvetti, a couple of which have been revived and recorded under Leonardo García Alarcón.

Daniele progresses through an alternation of plain recitative and mostly brief da capo arias, with a single duet and one trio. Choruses are few, restricted primarily to the opening – a splendidly dramatic outburst for the Babylonian priests as they threaten Daniel – and closing pieces. The oratorio’s somewhat uninspired libretto concerns not only the familiar story of Daniel surviving his visit to the lion’s den, but also the more lurid tale of his overcoming of the dragon Baal, who explodes having consumed Daniel’s cakes, a concoction of boiled pitch, fat and hair! Written in five parts, Daniele is here, surely correctly, assigned to solo voices with a small string ensemble plus trumpet, the latter not mentioned or credited among the performers in the booklet. The results are more appropriate than Alarcó’s over-blown performances of the Falvetti oratorios. Indeed the solo ensemble in the choruses is, along with the orchestral playing, one of the most satisfying aspects of the present performances. All the solo parts are demanding, particularly the arias for the two sopranos, Daniel (Hannah Fraser-Mackenzie) and the Angel (Billie Robson) and while the cast makes a brave attempt it needs virtuoso rather than good honest singers to do real justice to such a work. Ornaments are generally rather tentatively added, the trill being a foreign country. Finally, it has to be said that although Daniele is agreeable enough, there is little in the oratorio to suggest that Francesco Scarlatti is a forgotten master. Top marks for endeavour, rather fewer for attainment.

Brian Robins

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Recording

Fasch: Orchestral Works, Volume 4

CD cover Fasch Orchestral music Tempesta di Mare volume 4

Tempesta di Mare
Philadelphia Baroque Orchestra
67:25
Chandos Chaconne CHAN0829

Hats off to Tempesta di Mare and their directors for pursuing this remarkable project to record another four orchestral works by Johann Friedrich Fasch for the first time. The sound files were captured at a live concert in one of the few historical buildings in the town of Zerbst, where the composer was Kapellmeister for 36 years, to have been restored to its former glory in modern times. The event marked their receipt of the Fasch-Preis der Stadt Zerbst which is awarded at every Fasch Festival to someone (a musicologist, a musician, or a group) who has made significant contributions to the cause of promoting his music.

With three discs of premieres already under their belt, this time they present two orchestral suites, a violin concerto and one of his sinfonie. The suites – the instrumental form in which Fasch was most prodigious – both start with the tri-partite slow–fast and imitative–slow French overture. These are followed in both cases by a sequence of Bouree(s)–Gavotte(s)–Minuets, interspersed with a rich variety of Airs. Having obbligato parts for pairs of oboes and flutes, the composer has plenty of instrumental colour to play with.

It is impossible to say for whom the Violin Concerto FaWV L: G6 was written. Fasch himself was a violinist; several virtuosic concertos by his Konzertmeister and successor as Kapellmeister (though was he never given the official title!) Carl Hoeckh survive; Hoeckh was recommended to Zerbst by his former colleague, Franz Benda, who politely declined an offer of the position when he entertained the court with his playing; Johann Wilhelm Hertel was Hoeckh’s student in Zerbst in the 1740s; Fasch was a personal friend of the Dresden Konzertmeister, Johann Georg Pisendel… the list goes on. Regardless, especially in the second and third movements, it places serious demands on the technical and lyrical ability of the soloist. Typically, the concertmaster of Tempesta di Mare, Emlyn Ngai, takes all of these in his stride with flair to spare!

The opening of the first movement of the Sinfonia FaWV M: B1 is an interesting example of 18th-century notational quirks. Handily enough, the first page of the composer’s score is printed in facsimile in the booklet. The melody starts with a dotted crotchet and three semiquavers (a dotted quarter and three 16ths) which Tempesta di Mare interpret as a triplet. There are other sources for the work though, one of them a set of parts in the hand of Fasch’s friend from his Leipzig student days and mentor when the younger man undertook a journeyman tour after university and studied with him in Darmstadt where he was Kapellmeister: Christoph Graupner. In these parts, the crotchet (quarter) is tied to the first of four semiquavers (16ths), so the result is quite different; instead of being heard quickly over the fourth and eighth quavers (1/8s), the 16ths match the bass part… That academic point notwithstanding, this is as exciting a performance of the work as you are likely to hear. If my ears do not deceive me, TdM decided to add flutes to the upper part – an approach with which I have no problem, especially in the plaintive second movement where the added colour emphasizes the mood. The pseudo-fugal third movement is (as co-director Richard Stone’s typically no-nonsense booklet note explains) one of Fasch’s “signatures”; this particular movement also appears in one of the composer’s orchestral suites with oboe parts, so the involvement of woodwinds without their being indicated in the score is justified once again. I find Fasch’s “fugues” are never strict in the Bach-ian sense, but they do always have a logical shape (a trait he shares with another of his friends, Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel) and the pedal points towards the end always build the drama. The concluding minuet is reduced to a three-part texture (trebles, viola, bass): Another Fasch trademark.

I have put off reviewing this disc for several months because I didn’t want to be all gushy, just because I’m a fully-signed-up Faschist, and a great fan of TdM. The disc never fails to uplift my heart – yes, even on a gloomy winter’s day like this, so I have no hesitation whatever in recommending it to any fan of 18th-century orchestral music.

Brian Clark

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Recording

Brahms: Cello sonatas

CD cover Brahms Cello sonatas Amy Norrington Piet Kuijken

Amy Norrington cello, Piet Kuijken fortepiano
61:55
Etcetera KTC 1820

It is not often Early Music Review strays into the second half of the 19th century, or indeed that I do when it comes to reviewing. The reasoning here is that the performances of the two Brahms cello sonatas are played on period instruments, the cello being a 1695 Francesco Ruggiero with covered gut strings while the piano is a Johann Baptist Streicher from 1868. As will be seen both play a prominent role in contributing to the success of the performances. And many readers will doubtless guess from the names that the performers have strong connections with early music, Amy Norrington being the daughter of Sir Roger, while Piet Kuijken is the son of Wieland Kuijken, a distinguished member of perhaps the most prominent of all early music families.

A period of over twenty years separates the two sonatas for cello and piano. The first, the three-movement op 38 in E minor, dates originally from 1862, but three years later Brahms replaced the slow movement with a new fugally-orientated finale. The sonata is dominated by its expansive opening Allegro non troppo, here running for over 14 minutes. It opens with a gently lyrical statement for the cello which is immediately answered by the piano, and already in the laying of the foundations of this movement we hear a number of features that will come to typify the characteristics of these performances. The first is the beautiful shaping of the cello theme and the tone produced by Norrington, a long line in which the purity is maintained without recourse to a distracting degree of vibrato. And although Norrington proves in many places she has the technique for the more strenuous writing, it is these expressive cantabile passages more than anything that remain in the mind. Secondly, the piano proves to my mind ideal for this music, perhaps unsurprisingly given that apparently Brahms himself owned a Streicher constructed in the same year as the instrument employed here. The top has a beautiful silvery tone in lyrical writing, but across the range produces a rich tonal quality of real character. Most importantly, the balance between cello and piano is near ideal in denser, more intense passages where the cello can tend to be swamped by a modern piano.

The later four-movement Sonata in F, op 99, dates from 1886 and is technically more demanding in some ways, particularly the urgent, thrusting third movement, its dynamism alleviated to some degree by the more lyrical central section. The briefer, fleet-footed final Allegro molto also demands considerable agility, again more than convincingly met in the present case. Finally, and especially rewarding for the present writer, are three song transcriptions – presumably made by the performers – ‘Es träumte mir’ from op 57 especially inducing some of the magically sensitive playing on the disc, the little touches of portamento in particular perfectly judged. It was a pleasing idea to include the texts and translations of the songs; it adds to the excellent impression left by what is for this writer an unexpectedly rewarding excursion into unfamiliar territory.

Brian Robins

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Recording

Virtù e Amore

CD cover Virtù e Amore Sinfonie and Arias from the late Baroque

Sinfonie and Arias from the late Baroque
Inés Lorans, Orchestra de Camera ‘Benedetto Marcello’, Mauricio Colasanti
53:02
Tactus TC 690003

This live recording of a recital of music by Porpora, Vivaldi, Handel, Tessarini, Jommelli and Araja features the voice of Franco-Spanish soprano Inés Lorans accompanied by the chamber orchestra ‘Benedetto Marcello’. Lorans is technically assured and has a pleasingly animated approach to the music, with some spectacular and deftly managed ornamentation as in her imaginative decoration of Tornami a vagheggiar from Handel’s Alcina. She sings some of the most celebrated arias of the period including the timeless Lascia ch’io pianga from Handel’s Rinaldo. In this, the orchestral forces are sympathetic and supportive, although elsewhere there is a slight feeling of ‘phoning it in’ from the ensemble, while intonation isn’t always entirely convincing – this is a live recording so perhaps there can be some excuse for the latter but certainly not the former. The Overture de La Stravaganza by the unfamiliar Carlo Tessarini fails to live up to its billing as demonstrating ‘musical creativeness, which never repeats itself’ – in this short example, creativity is in short supply, while repetition seems the order of the day. In short, this recording is a very mixed bag, and – in the highly competitive world of Baroque string playing – these lackadaisical performances just don’t cut it for me. This is a pity, as I think in different company and with a more consistently high-quality choice of repertoire the vocalist Inés Lorans would be much more convincing.

D. James Ross

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Recording

Baroque Arabesque

CD cover Baroque Arabesque

Fiori Musicali Austria
62:19
Gramola 99279

‘With this album Baroque Arabesque the ensemble Fiori Musicali Austria invites a variety of thought-experiments’ – I open my review with a sentence from the programme note as it perfectly sums up what this CD is aiming to achieve. At a time of mass migration, the musicians are conjecturing about cultural interactions in earlier centuries. They alternate tracks of Sephardic folk music and other traditional music with eastern elements with mainstream western Baroque music by composers such as Caccini, Athanasius Kircher, Handel, Tomaso Vitali and Couperin. So far so good, but actually if they had left it at this, the obvious contrast between the two idioms is considerable – this is where the thought-experimenting comes in. The group’s percussionist, who plays a seminal role in the traditional music, is let loose on the Baroque music, ‘Arabesquing it up’ in a way which to my mind is entirely implausible. The most extreme example of this is the group’s version of Tornami a vagheggiar from Handel’s Alcina, where a lovely Baroque aria is well and truly put through the mill with oud and percussion additions triggering some alarming responses from the group’s vocalist and other instrumentalists. We can’t of course say categorically that performances of this kind of mainstream Baroque repertoire never took place, but this is surely modern ‘makey-uppy’ performance practice of the most ridiculous kind. I have been consistently critical of lazy attempts to overlay music of one cultural genre with the practices of another – more than once I have felt that the great Jordi Savall has engaged in cross-cultural fantasy at the expense of the music – but this thought experiment is of another order. Shoe-horning oud and ethnic percussion into the self-contained world of Baroque music is at the same time unconvincing and pointless. I do hope that Fiori Musicali Austria spend more of their time engaging honestly with early repertoire, as their performances are not without merit, but sadly this project seems to me a misconceived and fundamentally dishonest waste of everybody’s time.

D. James Ross

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Navigating Foreign Waters

CD cover Navigating foreign waters

Spanish Baroque & Mexican Folk Music
Maria Cristina Kiehr, Krishnasol Jiménez, Roberto Koch 51:30
Brilliant Classics 96205

This CD arose from the quest of three musicians based in South America to explore the Spanish roots for their folk music. The already distinctive son of much Spanish music in the 16th and 17th centuries underwent further transformation on contact with the Spanish colonies in Mesoamerica, most notably the jarocho music of Mexico. Krishnasol Jiménez plays the famous Stradivarius ‘Sabionari’ guitar of 1679 (beautifully illustrated inside the CD package), while Roberto Koch improvises a bass line on a colascione, a sort of three-stringed bass lute employed in folk music and also known as the liuto della giraffa on account of its long neck! The sound of these two plucked instruments in combination with Maria Cristina Kiehr’s pure and expressive soprano voice is very pleasing. I find it interesting that these musicians from Mexico, Venezuela and Argentina respectively, performing with a genuine New World perspective, take a much more restrained approach to the Mexican idioms than do many Old World musicians. Their performances are often languidly charming rather than spikey with cross-rhythms, although at the same time, I don’t want to make them sound dull – where appropriate they are infectiously toe-tapping. There is even a bit of ‘body-tapping’ of one of the stringed instruments – one would hope of the colascione rather than the venerable guitar. Perhaps it is the participation of this priceless survivor, which dictates the generally respectful approach of the performers. In any case, the performers’ backgrounds and musical experience as well as the instruments they employ give their performances of this repertoire considerable authority, and this minimal ensemble of three performers has a delightful completeness about it.

D. James Ross

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Froberger: Suites for Harpsichord (vol. 3)

CD cover Froberger Gilbert Rowland vol. 3

Gilbert Rowland
120: 17 (2 CDs)
Athene ath 23213

This collection of twelve suites for harpsichord represents around a third of the suites he wrote, which in turn are a small part of his oeuvre for keyboard. In a comprehensive programme note, the harpsichordist Gilbert Rowland makes a strong case for Froberger as ‘one of the most important and highly original composers of the seventeenth century’. Listening to this concluding third volume in a complete account of the composer’s suites, I am inclined to agree with him. Born in Stuttgart to a musical family, Froberger soon found his way to Vienna where he was court organist to Ferdinand III, who paid for him to imbibe the very latest keyboard trends from Frescobaldi in Rome. Later in life, he was drawn to the glittering Paris of Louis XIV and the company of Duchess Sybilla of Württemberg, a talented pupil and evidently a close friend in whose company he eventually died. It is easy to hear the influence of Frescobaldi in this music but there is a solid Germanic core to it which recalls the music of much later keyboard composers such as Handel. It would be fascinating to hear the choral music by Froberger which has recently re-surfaced, which may have been written for the Viennese Hofkapelle, but clearly the keyboard lay at the heart of his profession and also his surviving work. Rowland plays an impressive 2-manual French-style harpsichord by Andrew Wooderson after a 1750 original by Goermans of Paris, maybe an instrument with a slightly fuller sound than Froberger would have been familiar with almost a century earlier. It does sound magnificent though, and Rowland makes intelligent use of its available timbres, playing with complete technical assurance and innate musicality – and more than that: His intimate understanding of Froberger’s idiom gives his playing an authority which makes his bold claims utterly convincing.

D. James Ross

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Biber: Sonatae Violino Solo 1681

CD cover Biber Sonatae Violino Solo 1681 Nikitassova

Plamena Nikitassova, Les  Elémens
111:25 (2 CDs)
cpo 555 481-2

Wow – these are barnstorming accounts by violin virtuoso Plamena Nikitassova of Biber’s ground-breaking Sonatas for violin and BC of 1681! Such is the dynamic approach of the soloist and her ensemble that it is easy to imagine the stunning effect these works had when Biber first launched them on the Salzburg public. They have all the spontaneity and originality we associate with Biber at his finest, and were an instant success, remaining popular in the repertoire for two centuries. Nikitassova follows instructions clearly laid out in two German treatises of the 17th century regarding her playing position and where she places the instrument – both illustrated on the cover painting on the CD but also in a photo inside of Nikitassova in performance. It looks like a risky way to hold a violin, but perhaps it contributes to the dangerous edgy qualities in these accounts. Flying through terrifying technical demands with breathtaking assurance, Nikitassova always sounds as if she is living dangerously, but the result is thrilling and surely just right for this eccentric and risky repertoire. This is the music of a new kid on the block out to impress – I was reminded of Beethoven’s opus 1 trios – and must have taken the musical scene in Salzburg by storm. Interesting that just a century later Mozart found Salzburg so stifling, clearly little of Biber’s radicalism had survived. The performers find room at the end of the programme for an anonymous Sonata in a similar vein to the Biber probably by his pupil Johann Vilsmayr, which found its way to Dresden but which was also probably composed in the musical ferment which was late 17th-century Salzburg. I must admit to being a huge ‘Beliber’, but I loved the courage and sheer chutzpah of these performances and am sure Biber would approve 100%.

D. James Ross