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Sheet music

Francesco Gasparini: Mass for Five Treble Voices

Gasparini Mass for five treble voices

Recent Researches in the Music of the Baroque Era, 208
Edited by Christine R. Howlett
x, four plates, 80pp.
A-R Editions, Inc. ISBN 978-1-9872-0281-6 $150

I have known about this work for many, many years so it is a real pleasure to welcome a fine edition of it. Unusual not only for its scoring (SSSAA & Basso contiuo) but also the fact that it is a full mass (with Credo AND Agnus Dei), it is – as Christine Howlett says in her fine introduction to the work – a showstopper for the female singers of the Pietà in Venice, where Gasparini was maestro di coro from 1710. There are solos and duets but much of the work actually does use a five-part texture, though the composer is careful to deploy the voices in a variety of combinations to maximise aural variety, including having two or more voices sing passages in unison. All in all, this is an excellent edition of a very exciting work and I sincerely hope that it can be made available at bulk discount price to female choirs who will simply love it!

Brian Clark

Click HERE to buy it on amazon.com

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Sheet music

Maria Anna von Raschenau: Le sacre stimmate di San Francesco d’Assisi

Cover of Raschenau oratorio RRMBE 207

Edited by Janet K. Page
Recent Researches in the Music of the Baroque Era, 207
xxxviii, six plates, 92pp
ISBN 978-1-9872-0255-7 $180

One of seven similar works known by the composer, Le sacre stimmate di San Francesco d’Assisi was performed to Emperor Leopold I on St James day at the convent of that name in Vienna. The eight characters (SSSATTTB voices for St Francis, Christ, the narrator and five seraphim) are allocated arias, duets, trios and choruses, interspersed with secco recitative (and some arioso). The writing is melodic if rather brief (though not dissimilar to music by Bertali and Schmelzer for the Imperial court chapel, so perhaps that says more about the emperor’s preferences?) The voices are accompanied by a string group; the editor has chosen to interpret “viole” has violas da gamba and curiously (to my mind, at least) decided to number them 1-3, although the two numbers for which they are specified in only use two, albeit in different clefs. I would question the idea of someone sitting around with their soprano-clef viola, waiting just to play in one movement. Such a level of prescription when there is none in the source strikes me as counterintuitive. Likewise, I see no mention in the (detailed and highly interesting) introduction of that fact that the top violin and the top viola parts pretty much double one another an octave apart for most of the time – which, in turn, largely double the alto part. As the only musical source is a score copied by an imperial scribe (apparently Leopold liked to follow the music as he listened), its authority is dubious and this quirk ought as least to have been mentioned. I absolutely take my hat off to Janet K. Page for meticulously tracking down almost all of the Biblical references given in the printed libretto; while I’m not sure that Latin was absolutely essential, and I’m not 100% convinced that modern performers require such background when the editor has also provided a beautiful translation of the sung Italian text, it shows an exemplary thoroughness. As far as the edition goes, it is laid out in traditional A-R format and follows (broadly) their usual editorial approach. The only thing that I don’t particularly like about that is the tacit suppression of original accidentals; retaining them would have made challenging the dubious D flats in bar 41 on page 41 more difficult (as it is, if there were no flat on the penultimate note of the previous bar, I would have probably added an editorial natural at that point!), and on page 50, surely the brackets in the continuo part are superfluous, since the pitch of the note continues over the barline. But these are very, very small points in a thoroughly excellent edition. I hope performers will be encouraged to investigate this largely unknown part of Hapsburg music history.

Brian Clark

Click HERE to buy the score on amazon.com.

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Recording

The Oboe in Dresden

Cover of Xenia Löffler's "The oboe in Dresden" CD

Xenia Loeffler [and friends]
78:00
Accent 24361

Just by the merest suggestion of any link to the superb Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, the level of music-making seems already guaranteed. The marvellous array of chamber works gathered here by the co-founder of the famous Berlin ensemble are presented in such a way as to beguile and delight from start to finish! Not only is the amazingly dexterous, mellifluous oboe given full centre-stage exposure, but the excellent qualities of the top-draw instrumentalists follow in a trail of captivating musicianship. The opening Vivaldi (RV53) does that well-known slow-fast-slow-fast trick, but if the transition between these modes is truly faultless, the last two movements are quite stupendous! Next we come to an anonymous piece in B flat major, which uses a typical Telemann device of “Replique” responses in the two main instrumental voices, found in the Paris Quartets and elsewhere. The second movement seems to be a parody of a vocal line from one of his Harmonsicher Gottesdienst cantatas (TVWV1:447?) another quite typical device of hidden tunes used by him, equally prevalent in some of the Kleine Kammermusik of 1716. The Fasch work is a sprightly exposition of double oboes and virtuoso bassoon, perfectly written and performed to a treat. The links to Dresden’s fine orchestra become ever stronger moving through these excellent works. Next some known Telemann, one of his Sonatas Auf Concertenart, i. e., a neat blend of Trio and concerto styles; the soloists again display such an admirably vivacious interplay, one is swept along in their joyous wake. The final pieces show contrasting styles and varying instrumentation, the Platti is more conventional in layout, yet played with intimate skill, while the Hasse is truly a gem of a real master, the distinct timbres of the chalumeau, oboe and bassoon creating a glorious, warmly glowing sonority! The following anonymous Trio, possibly by Pisendel himself, leader of the Dresden Band. The violin part does seem to support this with its lively virtuosic interactions with the oboe, yet another high point on this remarkable recording which ends with a brilliant quartet by Stölzel for oboe, violin, horn and b.c.

What a superb selection of works, ideal for any concert, played with gusto, insight and consummate skill; as enthralling as gifted members of the Dresden orchestra itself, in a remarkable “pool of talents”. No little histories on the soloists’ past exploits or collective rewards are mentioned in the slim CD booklet, just a few lovely publicity shots; the whole CD concentrates purely on the music itself to such a rewarding extent! Top-draw!

David Bellinger

Click HERE to buy the MP3 on amazon (the CD is not yet available on the site – 13/1//2019)

Categories
Recording

Michael Haydn Collection

Cover of the boxed set of Michael Haydn

28 CDs in a cardboard box
Brilliant Classics 95885

Yes, you read the heading correctly – this set comprises 28 CDs of music by Michael Haydn! Best known for having a more famous brother, or (more flatteringly though “let’s not exaggerate”) the composer whom Mozart thought highly enough of to complete a set of duets for violin and viola, Michael Haydn really hasn’t had the best of press.

Now, at an amazing price of less than £2 per disc, you can totally immerse yourself in his soundworld. Unsurprisingly, this is NOT a Suzuki- or Koppmen-like methodical survey of the complete works; rather, it is a bringing together of various recordings from a number of companies (hänssler, oehms, and cpo, to name but a few) with period instrument performances alongside those by more “traditional” choirs and chamber orchestras; the opera is “modern” (with a HIP conductor to help), while the Singspiels are wholly HIP; two volumes of the complete string quintets (another overlapping interest with Mozart) feature extremely fine gut strung playing, while the quartets are played on steel. A modest booklet gives a biography of the composer and describes each of the discs; the card cover for each gives full information of the original recording.

As someone who has always enjoyed Haydn’s music (I remember the hairs on the back of my neck standing up the first time I heard a BIS recording of masses with oboe band!) I found the journey through these discs (some of which I had actually reviewed before) very enjoyable; his church music is especially attractive and it does not surprise me that it is found in archives across the German-speaking world. I did find myself tiring of amorphous non-HIP basslines and tiered dynamics, but that has nothing to do with the quality of the music, which in general is very high.

I recommend this to anyone into Classical music (in the strict sense) – I remember giving a concert in Dundee in 1991 in which we challenged the audience to identify which pieces we played and sung were by Mozart or not by Mozart; not a single person got the answer correct . If you played any of the present CDs as background music to a dinner party, I doubt anyone would be surprised to learn that it wasn’t Mozart too!

Brian Clark

Click HERE to buy this set of CDs on amazon.

Categories
Recording

Music by Cipriano Rore

CD cover of Blue Heron da Rore madrigals recording

da Rore: I madrigali a cinque voce
Blue Heron
120:49 (2 CDs in a card folder)
Blue Heron BHCD 1009

de Rore: Missa “Vivat Felix Hercules”
Weser-Renaissance Bremen
69:47
cpo 777 989-2

Blue Heron’s recordings of music from the Peterhouse Partbooks resulted in five compact discs which received acclaim and prizes, including the first and so far only instance of the Gramophone Early Music Award being made to an American vocal ensemble. It was therefore with a great sense of anticipation that their next major project, Cipriano de Rore’s complete book of madrigals in five parts, 1542, has been awaited. Unsurprisingly they deliver in spades, both in performance and in presentation, with a booklet including erudite but readable and informative essays by Jessie Ann Owens and Scott Metcalfe. Rore comes over as a natural composer of madrigals, and Blue Heron have the versatility to do his music ample justice. Perhaps sensitive to prospective purchasers contemplating the prospect of up to twenty madrigals in identical scoring being sung off the reel, Blue Heron preface each madrigal with the original texts, the majority by Petrarch, being read by Alessandro Quarta; suffice to say he declaims them as effectively as Blue Heron subsequently sing them. Rore’s 1542 collection was famously innovative, with its intense engagement between the music and the words unprecedented in secular vocal music, and it set the standard, including the use of five vocal parts, for the more serious type of madrigal till the seventeenth century. Basically his madrigals are a fusion of the Franco-Flemish polyphonic style which, as we hear on Weser-Renaissance’s disc, he himself exploited in his sacred music, with the lighter, airier, Italian style. Whereas some such fusions simply refuse to “fuse” in the wrong hands, Rore’s collection exhibits a high standard throughout. This makes it very hard to single out individual works to recommend. Thanks to the versatility and sensitivity of Blue Heron’s singers, and to Scott Metcalfe – the most stylish conductor that I can remember seeing (in Cambridge, 2016) – every work receives detailed individual attention. A work such as Quel sempre acerbo et honorato giorno could pass superficially as a Franco-Flemish motet, while Perseguendomi Amor al luogo usato comes across as what posterity would come to regard as typically madrigalian.

Weser-Renaissance recording of de Rore's Mass - cover of the booklet

Weser-Renaissance’s disc is a different kettle of fish. Partly this reflects Rore’s own versatility as a composer. Although nothing quite beats the frisson of a live performance, one benefit of recordings is that one can listen to performances more than once and, if desired, do so soon after the first hearing, as many times as one wants. This certainly worked for me regarding Weser-Renaissance’s disc. At a first hearing I thought that the performances were inexpressive and stodgy, and the music, especially the Mass, turgid. Unwilling to sound off after a single unsatisfactory hearing, I listened again and the fog began to lift. Come a third helping I had reached my current state of admiration for both the singing and the music. The catalyst occurred during the second session with the electrifying music set to the words “miserere nobis” in Agnus I and II, and again to “dona nobis pacem” in Agnus III. Now I found myself able to listen in a different way, to hear the light and shade in the motets, and to appreciate further impressive passages of writing in Pater noster and especially Da pacem, Domine. In critical mode, I still feel that in the Gloria and Credo of his Mass, Rore is somewhat of a prisoner to his motto “Vivat felix Hercules secundus, dux Ferrariae quartus” which is treated as a Soggetto cavato during the Mass, in the manner of Josquin’s Missa Hercules dux Ferrariae. But overall it is a fine work, interspersed with several estimable motets, featuring imaginative scoring expressed through expert polyphony with judiciously placed sections of homophony. Weser-Renaissance perform it all sonorously ensuring clarity within Rore’s sumptuous textures.

Richard Turbet

Click HERE to buy the Blue Heron CD on amazon.

Click HERE to buy the Weser-Renaissance MP3 recording on amazon.

 

 

Categories
DVD

Lully: Te Deum, Biber: Missa Salisburgensis

Cover of the DVD of Biber and Lully

Les Pages du Centre de musique baroque de Versailles, Collegium 1704, Collegium Vocale 1704, dir. Václav Luks
DVD CVS012
89:00

Although this is a Versailles production, the performances were filmed in Rome’s rather gorgeous Basilica San Giovanni in Laterano. I have two reservations about the performance practice on view. Are theorbo and harp really appropriate continuo instruments for either piece, and should both works really sound at the same pitch? Is this pitch (415) actually correct for either of them? Apart from that, the performances themselves are very good.

I have rather more issues with the format and the use made of it. Particularly if a concert is to be filmed, someone has to think about what it looks like. Someone should have told the conductor to re-tie his tie before he went on stage and also that his light brown suit looked pretty awful in the context of everyone else’s black, and the singers should have been warned to continue to look engaged and not to stare blankly into the middle distance when not directly involved in the performance.

And the potential of the medium has scarcely had its surface scratched. There are no extras, no subtitles and the encores (repeats of sections of the mass and which need not have been included) are not identified. In addition, the camera-work is quite pedestrian and there is no real attempt to convey the spatial aspects of the Biber.

So not a visual success I’m afraid, though the booklet does offer the information that should have been on the screen.

David Hansell

Categories
Recording

Clérambault: Chamber Music from the Brossard Collection

Booklet cover for The Bach Players' Clérambault CD

The Bach Players
58:49
Coviello Classics COV91928

This disc is a further exploration by the ensemble of Sébastien de Brossard’s library, their previous release having presented music by Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre. Here, we are offered instrumental music by Clérambault, a useful counter-balance to the image of ‘cantata king’ that has developed around him. As with all Bach Players programmes, there is a strong impression that ‘someone has thought about it’. There are three trio sonatas, two solo sonatas (each prefaced by a keyboard prelude) and two chaconnes, also for solo violin and continuo. Further variety is embedded in the music of course: especially striking are those moments when the bass viol engages in the contrapuntal discourse, sometimes to spectacular effect!

I enjoyed the programme very much. There is an unfussy honesty and a unity of purpose about the playing which most emphatically is not a kind way of saying ‘a bit dull’. One hears so many ensembles in this repertoire with kaleidoscopic continuo sections, changes of instrumentation for repeats. etc., that it really is a welcome relief to hear classy performances with everything in place that just say ‘Here’s the music. Isn’t it terrific?’. Yes, it is. The booklet will not disappoint either.

David Hansell

Click HERE to buy this CD on amazon.

Categories
Recording

Destouches: Issé

Cover of the booklet for Destouche's Issé

Van Wanroij, Vidal, Dolié, [Santon-Jeffery, Lefebvre], Les Chantres du CMBV, Ensemble Les Surprises, L.-N. Bestion de Camboulas
120:34 (2 CDs in a card folder)
Ambronay AMY053

This charming pastorale héroique was one of 18th-century France’s greatest operatic hits. First performed in 1697, re-worked in 1708 and 1724 and still in the Versailles repertoire in 1773, it also enjoyed a sustained run in Paris from late 1733 into 1734. The music is lovely – dramatically engaging, melodically inventive and orchestrally colourful – and, even in this five-acts-and-a-prologue form, of manageable length.

I might have loved much of this in a theatre but the repeated listening that a recording gets raises some questions. The rather studious composed orchestral ornaments for e. g., the first section of the overture do sound less likely on each hearing; I doubt that the percussion was specified by the composer; and while theorboes are perfectly reasonable in French opera until about 1730 I’m not convinced by the guitar.

Moreover, the first two-and-a-half minutes raise the fundamental problem of so many performances, particularly of early opera, that one hears. The (brief) overture introduces us to one sound-world after which we are disturbed (not too strong a word) by a voice from another sonic universe – ironically singing about ‘une douceur profonde’. I really did wince. And I think others will also struggle with the un-reconstructed modern singing (including by the chorus) against much beautiful, gentle instrumental sound. But some might not.

The booklet (French & English) offers every help to those wishing to explore. The essay is concise but informative and there is a full libretto with parallel translation. I do wish, however, that the dull artist biographies offered a glimpse of the person behind the lists of prizes, roles and conductors-worked-with.

David Hansell

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Recording

Bach: The Toccatas BWV910-916

CD booklet cover for Bach: The toccatas

Mahan Esfahani harpsichord
76:53
hyperion CDA68244

The seven Toccatas BWV 910-916 are performance pieces sans pareil. They are exactly what you might have expect to hear if you had asked Johann Sebastian to try out a new harpsichord for you – sonorous chords to test the resonance and the stringing, fugal sections to prove the clarity of the voicing and the responsiveness of the action, episodes to test the two-part balance in lighter sections, sequential passages to gauge the temperament as you slide up and down the keyboard, shifting from key to key and slower sections to assess the chromatic and rhapsodic possibilities – they are all there.

This makes them ideal vehicles for Esfahani – and his harpsichord.  Esfahani is a harpsichordist rather than a period instrument player, and is a champion of the instrument’s possibilities in music old and new. On this recording – the microphones are set close enough to give us every nuance of the damping, and the final chords are frequently held very long as the instrument’s resonance is allowed to continue – Esfahani plays a 2018 instrument from the Prague workshop of the Finnish maker, Jukka Ollikka, ‘based on the theories and surviving examples of Michael Mieke with the hypothetical addition of an extra soundboard for the 16’ register and a cheek inspired by Pleyel 1912; the disposition is as follows: 16’ 8’ 8” 4’ with buff on the upper manual/soundboard from carbon fibre composite, EE to f3/length 2.8 metres.’

I quote this note from the booklet (p.5) in its entirety, as there is no photograph there of the instrument or any other information, and listeners must judge for themselves just what they make of it. It is certainly both powerful and technically faultless, like Esfahani’s playing. If you look up the maker on the internet, his website will direct you a Youtube recording of the flute sonatas where Esfahani talks about as well as plays his custom-made instrument.

His essay in the booklet discusses the many variant readings of the texts, as no autograph of the music has survived in Bach’s hand, and in the process reveals something of Esfahani’s spiritual journey. He sees the combination of the ‘earthy free sections of the toccatas with the highly abstract ‘divine’ truth of the fugues as a meeting point of human imperfection and godly perfection.’

His essay offers a well-argued and highly plausible usicological-theological reflection on the interrelationship between text and performance which deserves a wide exposure to critical debate.

I wholly recommend this disc not just for its well-argued and committed performances of these mysterious works, but also for the insights into the performer’s continuing dialogue between ‘authenticity’ and expression.

David Stancliffe

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Categories
Recording

Amadio Freddi: Vespers (1616)

CD booklet cover for Freddi Vespers

The Gonzaga Band, Jamie Savan
58:10
resonus RES10245
+ Castello, Donati, A & G Gabrieli, Grandi & Biagio Marini

This recording is another triumph for Jamie Savan and his Gonzaga Band. The research on Freddi and the way the performing edition for these elegant and tuneful movements – largely taken from Freddi’s Messa, vespro et compieta (Venice: Amadino 1616) – is excellently presented in five dense pages of informed and practical scholarship of a high order, which informs the whole enterprise. This is a model of how scholarship and performance should complement one another

We are given details of the sources, editions, instruments, pitch and temperament used. Particularly interesting is the use of a digital Hauptwerk organ running samples from the Nachini organ in S. Maria d’Alleito at Isola in Slovenia and played by Steven Devine. In a recording that itself is digitally created, I can see nothing wrong with using such an instrument, though I wonder what it feels like to sing or play next to it where there is no wind reservoir ‘breathing’ with you. The only other instruments alongside the six voices are Jamie Savan (cornetto) and Oliver Webber (violin), who play Freddi’s entwined and imitative writing in a way that not only imitates the florid vocal lines, but gives the impression of a very much larger instrumental ensemble. The richness of the overall texture created with such slender resources is one of the appealing things about this performance.

Just a violin and a cornetto with the organ was what Freddi had at his disposal when the forces at S. Antonio, Padua where he worked from 1592 to 1614, were reduced to keep the music establishment solvent. The combination appears again as the basic instrumental group hired in for the feast of the Assumption at S. Teonisto in Treviso, where he had moved in 1615, and is a combination that appears in places in the writing of Heinrich Schütz, for example.

The psalms Savan has chosen from the collection are those proper to a Vespers of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and as in the Monteverdi 1610 Vespers, he has interspersed the psalms with works for single voices, and a number of sonatas by Donati, Marini  and Castello together with some brief intonazioni by Giovanni and Andrea Gabrieli and a motet by Grandi. This is welcome, as fascinating though it is to hear the Freddi works, the voice and instrument combinations are limited and the textures and idioms feel much more samey than the widely varied styles of Monteverdi’s work – but then Monteverdi was trying to display the maximum number of ways the plainsong could be treated, which was not part of Freddi’s game plan. After repeated listenings, I found the music tuneful but not essentially memorable, though some of the instrumental sonatas and the solo motet by Grandi raised the game.

As before with the Gonzaga Band, Fay Newton’s contributions steal the show. Hardly any other soprano has her wonderful voice: light, bright and flexible, yet capable of astonishing changes of colour and mood. This is not to say that the other voices are not excellent – they are equally well-matched. So this is another example of how to create a wonderful but largely unrecognised musical world, where voices and instruments combine to create big effects with minimal forces. In today’s financially squeezed circumstances there is much to lean and admire. Plus ça change.

David Stancliffe

Click HERE to buy this as a download on amazon, or HERE to order a CD version.