Tag: Baroque

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Campana: Arie a una, due, e tre voci

CD cover of Campana Arie Ricercare Antico Brilliant Classics

Ricercare Antico, dir. Francesco Tomasi
64:31
Brilliant Classics 96008

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Born in Rome around 1610, Francesca Campana was known as a singer and spinet player, and her set of Arias in one, two and three parts published in 1629, when she was probably still a teenager, reveals a remarkable facility. While female composers were not unknown in Italy at the time, to have an entire publication devoted to your music as a woman was an unusual tribute and is surely a mark of the respect in which she was held. This is underlined by a letter of recommendation of 1633 in which her playing and singing are specifically and extravagantly praised. Her marriage to the composer Giovan Carlo Rossi seems to mark the end of her own compositional career although she lived on until 1665. The arias in the collection comprise solo airs with accompaniment as well as ensemble pieces we would be inclined to describe as madrigals. The writing is expressive and colourfully evocative – it is likely that Campana was writing largely for her own voice and an ensemble, and would probably have performed this music as well as benefiting from its publication. The performances here are imaginative, delicately ornamented and eloquently presented. The slightly close recording has an unfortunate deadening effect, and, as a result, some tracks sound a little plodding – perhaps a little more ambiance might have helped the music breathe a little more and the voices to ring more pleasingly. The arias themselves are interspersed with a beguiling selection of largely Neapolitan instrumental works from slightly earlier than the Campana pieces. This repertoire is catchy and engaging, and the playing is again charming and provides the perfect foil to the arias.

D. James Ross

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Vivaldi’s Seasons

CD cover Bolette Roed Vivaldi 4 seasons

Bolette Roed, Arte dei Suonatori
154:51 (2 CDs in a card triptych)
Pentatone PTC 5186 875

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The starting point for this project is recorder player Bolette Roed’s thought that ‘many of Vivaldi’s concertos comfortably fit into the ‘seasons’ theme if one thinks about it.’ What she and Arte dei Suonatori have done here is teamed up three further concerti from Vivaldi’s output with each of his iconic ‘Four Seasons’ concerti on the basis of their perceived mood. I have in the past lamented the fact that people feel free to meddle endlessly with Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’ in the belief that to justify performing music, which to put it politely is already ‘over-performed’, you have to find a ‘new slant’. I suspect your reaction to this project will depend very much on whether you think Roed should be performing violin music on recorders at all, and whether she should be second-guessing the composer’s intentions, when he had already placed the four seasonal concerti in the context of a larger set. I must confess that I have set aside any musicological prejudices to simply enjoy some wonderfully dynamic orchestral playing from Arte dei Suonatori, and some exquisitely expressive and virtuosic recorder playing from Bolette Roed. I was unfamiliar with many of the concerti that have been selected as ‘honorary seasons’, so I set myself a test – if you didn’t know that these were mainly violin concertos, would you really know they weren’t originally for recorder? The answer was invariably no, and in fact, the same might well be the case for the actual Seasons if I didn’t know better. It is only occasionally that I feel Roed is having to find slightly less idiomatic recorder equivalents for violin effects, and most of the time these performances just sound like terrific recorder music. This is a testimony to Roed’s consummate recorder technique, but also to the depth of understanding of the music that gave rise to the original project. You could perhaps argue that we don’t need ‘yet another’ account of the Seasons, but the same cannot be said of the other less familiar music, and there is certainly no denying the superb musicality and wonderful energy of these performances. In the course of some 30 years reviewing, I have had to listen to some horrendously ill-conceived attempts to ‘improve upon’ Vivaldi’s Four Seasons – I am delighted that this CD does not come into this category. These are pleasing, revelatory and above all respectful performances of Vivaldi’s music.

D. James Ross

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Venturini: Concerti

CD cover la festa musicale play concerti by Venturini

la festa musicale
63:32
audite 97.775


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The 12 concertos for four to nine instruments of Venturini’s op 1 were published around 1713 in Amsterdam by the eminent music publisher Estienne Roger. At times they are reminiscent of Vivaldi’s concerti con molti strumenti, but also look forward to the concerti grossi of the high Baroque, including those of Handel. This is scarcely surprising as the two composers’ paths crossed as the upwardly-mobile Handel briefly occupied the post of Kapellmeister at Hanover, where Venturini subsequently spent most of his working life in that same post. If Venturini had perhaps been ten years younger and had – like Handel – been lured to London, his reputation nowadays might have been very different. As these beautifully crafted and vividly recorded performances attest, he was a composer of enormous talent and imagination, with a prescient approach to colourful orchestration and a wonderful ‘Handelian’ ear for melody. It is fortunate that the Court of Hanover offered him orchestral forces that allowed him to realise fully his ambitious textures, which he combines and contrasts with effortless skill and flamboyance. In addition to performing three of the op 1 Concerti, la festa musicale have sought out and provide premiere recordings of two further works, a five-part overture and a six-part concerto from Swedish sources to further enhance our impression of Venturini’s music. Imaginative use of percussion and sound effects, most notably in the spine-chilling account of the Furies Presto in op 1 no 11, serve further to bring Venturini’s music to life. Although more conservative in texture, the six-part concerto for two solo violins and strings features some surprising and adventurous harmonic progressions.

D. James Ross

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Recording

The Great Violins

CD cover Sheppard Skærved Vilsmayr partitas

Vilsmaÿr: Artificiosus Concentus pro Camera
Peter Sheppard Skærved
81:51
athene ath 23210

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Johann Vilsmaÿr’s Six Partias (sic) for violin solo bridge the gap between the earliest such repertoire for solo violin by Biber and its fullest flowering at the hands of Bach and Telemann. Vilsmaÿr worked with Biber in Salzburg and would have been familiar with the latter’s remarkable oeuvre for solo violin – it is perhaps hardly surprising that his contribution to the genre is generally more orthodox, although it retains Biber’s interest in narrative flow and exploration of the sonic potential of the instrument. The lovely 1629 Amati violin, featured in this latest volume of the intriguing Great Violins series from athene, seems an instrument with an ideal depth of subtlety and sonority to bring this music to life. Whereas even just 20 years ago most people would have regarded the Bach Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin as an isolated masterpiece, the exploration of a variety of other sets of such music helps to set them in a context, and this latest set serves as something of a missing link in this genealogy. Vilsmaÿr described himself composing this music in his room, and it is easy to imagine him musing away on his instrument and improvising these elegant and expressive pieces. Skærved’s easy virtuosity and his obvious deep love of this instrument facilitate relaxed and wonderfully eloquent performances of the music, such that we can imagine ourselves eavesdropping on the original composition process.

D. James Ross

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Recording

Lully: Cadmus & Hermione

CD cover Lully Cadmus et Hermione Dumestre.jpg

Le Poème Harmonique – Ensemble Aedes, Vincent Dumestre
122:18 (2 CDs and a libretto in a cardboard wallet)
Château de Versailles Spectacles CVS037

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This was Lully’s first tragédie-en-musique. The libretto and, indeed, the new genre caused a certain amount of outrage among traditional dramatists but the mould had been broken and a new one created. This ‘studio-style’ recording was made in the opera house at Versailles which facilitates some doubling-up of the smaller parts, though this is of no great consequence. The artists are supported by a lavish booklet (essays in French, English and German, libretto in only French and English), though there are some minor typographical errors).

The solo singing is all very good, with well-paced recitative and well-defined emotions. I was less comfortable with the chorus, where the top line is not always as coherent as one might wish. But it is the instrumental contribution that I find disappointing, though others may think it wonderful. As is his habit, this conductor cannot resist fiddling with the instrumentation. The wind scoring is over-elaborated, and I doubt that Lully ever heard recorders at this pitch, let alone used them; I feel that the continuo is over-scored; and I also doubt the need for the percussion contributions.

When so much is so good it is a shame that these irritations occur. Cadmus is a fine work, and does not need this dressing-up.

David Hansell

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Recording

S. L. Weiss: Pièces de Luth

Diego Salamanca plays lute music by Weiss

Diego Salamanca lute
77:24
Seulétoile SE 01

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Diego Salamanca’s charming CD opens with the well-known Ouverture in B flat (SC4) of Sylvius Leopold Weiss (1687-1750). This piece survives in the two major sources of Weiss’s music: the London manuscript, Lbl Add. MS 30387, and the Dresden manuscript, Sächsische Landesbibliothek, MS Mus. 2841-V-1. The British Library has made their manuscript freely available online, and all the music Salamanca takes from it is transcribed into staff notation by Ruggero Chiesa in his Weiss anthology, Intavolatura di Liuto published back in 1968.
 
The Ouverture begins with a bright, optimistic chord of B flat major, and progresses with slow-moving chords interspersed with little bursts of single-line melody notes, ending with a cadence in the dominant (F major). There follows a brisk Allegro, which has the same rhythmic idea throughout – each new voice enters with three repeated up-beat quavers. Presumably to draw attention to a new entry of the theme, Salamanca often (mercifully not always) hesitates a moment before those repeated notes, yet there is no need for him to do so. The music is composed in a way which allows each new entry to be clearly heard, and those little hesitations interrupt the flow, albeit only a little. The piece ends with a short Largo, which has just six chords – each played three times and followed by a single-note semiquaver – followed by a descending passage of semiquavers leading to the hemiola of the final cadence.
 
From the Dresden manuscript Salamanca plays Weiss’s Sonata in G minor (SC51). This sonata lacks a prelude and a sarabande, so Salamanca adds Prelude (SC25) which precedes the Sonata in the manuscript. The Prelude consists of broken chords over a slow-moving bass, which Salamanca plays with suitable gravitas. There is a surprising moment where the music pauses in the middle for a full four seconds before continuing. He also includes the lovely Sarabande (SC49) in B flat (the relative major of G minor), which has some unexpected moments including touches of chromaticism. He picks a lively tempo for the Courante, Bourrée, and Polonaise. I like the clarity of his playing, and the way he gives phrases direction. The long, slow Allemande is especially delightful. The Sonata ends with an impressive, fast, gigue-like Presto.
 
There follows Fantaisie in C minor (SC 9) taken from the London Weiss manuscript. The first section has no bar-lines in the original, and consists entirely of quavers over a slow-moving bass. There is a pleasing amount of give and take from Salamanca as it builds up intensity, arriving at a lengthy dominant – 60 quavers in all over a pedal bass – and cadencing into the second section. This section does have bar-lines, has a stricter tempo, and is more fugal in character. There is a note in the manuscript at the end of the piece: ”Weis 1719 a Prague”.
 
The CD ends with Weiss’s Sonata in G major (SC22) from the London manuscript. The opening Prelude begins with eight chords, all with G in the bass, and with the four notes of each chord notated one on top of the other. In this performance each chord is broken into eight semiquavers, and Salamanca varies the order in which he arpeggiates them. There follows a passage in D major with a rising bass line and with c’# heard seven times as a lower auxiliary to d’; but when a chord of A major is firmly established, c’ naturals suddenly kick in, the bass works its way downwards, and the piece ends with a two-octave scale of G major. The scene is set for the Toccata and Fugue. The fugue is quite long, moving mainly in quick crotchets, with some interesting modulations to related keys. It is interspersed with short sequential passages in quavers where scrunchy dissonances are satisfyingly resolved. The excitement winds down at the end with a brief Adagio. The last movement is a bustling Allegro, where Weiss makes good use of the low 12th and 13th courses. He is given the credit for having these added to the 11-course lute round about 1719.
 
Salamanca’s lute has 13 courses, and was made by Maurice Ottiger. The treble notes are strong, but the bass are a little on the quiet side, which may be due more to the recording engineer than to the maker or player. The recording was made in the Donjon de Vez in Oise, France, which Salamanca says has an excellent acoustic for lutes. A few of the paintings from the Donjon’s modern art exhibition brighten the pages of the liner note booklet.
 
Stewart McCoy
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Recording

Tiranno

CD cover Kate Lindsey Tiranno

Kate Lindsey, [Nardus Williams soprano, Andrew Staples tenor], Arcangelo, Jonathan Cohen
75:34
Alpha Classics Alpha 736

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The tyranny of the title is that of the infamous Emperor Nero, coincidentally the subject (as I write) of a new exhibition at the British Museum that seeks to redress at least some of the infamy associated with his name. Unsurprisingly there is little redemptive in this collection featuring extracts from Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea and a group of cantatas from the late 17th and early 18th centuries, the most famous of which is the youthful Handel’s superbly freewheeling drama Agrippina condotta a morire, the confused and tormented words of Nero’s mother following her condemnation to death by her son. The locus topos of two cantatas by Alessandro Scarlatti could not be more different, Il Nerone finding the emperor in full tyrannical flow, ordering the death of his mother, his wife Ottavia and his old teacher Seneca, while his own death is the subject of La morte di Nerone, claimed as a first recording and obviously an early work since its arias are brief strophic verses rather than the usual da capo structures of the mature cantatas. Finally, and placed with little apparent sense of irony after the extreme sensuality of ‘Pur ti miro!’ (the final duet of Poppea), comes La Poppea by the little-known Bolognese composer Bartolomeo Monari (1662-97), a cantata recounting the lurid death of the pregnant Poppea following reputedly being kicked in the stomach by her husband. The work itself, incorporating both narrative and the words of the dying Poppea herself does not match the grim scenario, being relatively tame and concluding with a moralizing aria on the transience of beauty, a favourite trope of the period.

It goes without saying there is scope for highly dramatic interpretation in much of this music, dealing as so much of it does with extreme emotion. American mezzo Kate Lindsey has seemingly built a considerable reputation as a dramatic actress in a wide operatic range and employs it to the full here. Sadly it’s thoroughly 21st-century drama, at times, especially in the Handel, reducing the music to something like a modern psycho-drama, replete with overwrought self-indulgence and a vulgar use of portamento and other mannerisms, that quite forgets the ease and naturalness that the singing masters of the period expected. Ironically, it comes in the company of poor diction, one of Lindsey’s besetting sins and a particularly serious one in this repertoire. This is especially true of plain recitative, where the approach is too cantato and the tempo at times too slow.

Otherwise, my feelings on Lindsey’s singing are somewhat mixed. Were the programme to be judged on the basis of the opening Scarlatti cantata (Il Nerone), it would almost surely be dismissed by me out of hand, for the vibrato here is wide and near consistent, the interpretation highly mannered. Curiously, however, in more restrained moments and particularly when employing a lovely mezza voce in the middle range there is markedly less vibrato in evidence. Indeed a break in the voice at times gives the disconcerting impression that we are hearing two quite different voices.

The anachronistic character of these performances suggests they are unlikely to have great appeal to specialist readers of EMR. The Monteverdi and Monari are certainly better in this respect, though Ottavia’s  ‘Addio Roma!’ brings a fresh outburst of frenetically undisciplined singing. Lindsey is effectively supported in the Poppea extracts, especially by Nardus Williams in ‘Pur ti miro!’,  rather less so by the continuo players of Arcangelo, whose thrumming theorbist is a near-constant irritant.       

Brian Robins

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Recording

Bach: Sonatas for viola da gamba & harpsichord

CD cover Bach Sonatas for viola da gamba and harpsichord Robert Smith Francesco Corti

Robert Smith viola da gamba, Francesco Corti harpsichord
62:51
resonus RES10278

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This is a beautiful CD, and I recommend it wholeheartedly. Both performers are wonderful players and seem instinctively at home playing together. Smith’s poise, fluency and eloquence are matched by Corti’s impeccable sense of timing, where nothing is rushed but everything sparkles: they must have enjoyed making this recording immensely: listening to it repeatedly will not only be endlessly invigorating but forever reinforcing the cardinal skill of how to attend to each other. Smith plays a gamba by Pierre Bohr after Colichon and Corti a copy of a Mietke by Christoph Kern.

A bit of a mystery surrounds the gamba sonatas: once thought to date to that fertile period for chamber music in Cöthen, they now seem to be later, and perhaps part of Bach’s endless reinvention of his compositions in a variety of forms. In spite of what we know of the household’s music-making, so few trio sonatas seem to survive: was the double concerto in D minor for two violins originally a trio sonata for two violins and continuo? And were the Trio Sonatas for organ never played at home on a variety of melodic instruments? The opening movement of Sonata IV (BWV 528) had a previous life as the sinfonia for oboe d’amore and gamba that opened the second part of BWV 76 that dates from 1723. Bach was clearly a pioneer in trio sonatas where a single instrument is paired with the two hands of a Klavier, and the G major gamba sonata exists in an earlier form for two traversi and continuo. In these three sonatas, almost every style seems to get an airing, and while the fast movements reveal the players’ skills, the slow movements show just how far they can enter into each other’s emotional space.

Some of the sense of the unexpected is given to this CD by an additional sonata for gamba and harpsichord by Christopher Schaffrath (c.1710-1763). This three-movement sonata is in the lighter gallant style and provides a contrast to the Bach sonatas; but an even greater contrast is provided by Robert Smith’s own Dido’s Torment – a five-minute charged improvisatory solo, reminding us of the gamba’s history in the hands of Marin Marais and others as a favoured instrument for solo, late-night meditative playing.

But it is their Bach that is so memorable: no-one should be without it.

David Stancliffe

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Odile Edouard: En attendant J. Sebastian Bach

Floral design

Quatre cordes en vibration
La collection de l’oreille
les éditions de la matrice.m
https://www.sonarmein.bzh/en-attendant-johann-sebastian-bach.html

One of the effects of the enforced isolation of lockdown is that we have had the opportunity to reflect on how we have got to where we are. Amid the rash of autobiographical outpourings, musicians like the rest of us have been assessing where they are. Deprived of the normal context of music-making with others, solo recordings have multiplied. 

Odile Edouard has been an experienced and passionate teacher of HIP violin at the celebrated Conservatoire in Lyon since she was 24, and this CD of music for solo violin is her response to the deprivation of playing with others during the lockdown. The CD and its accompanying autobiographical booklet open a window on her passion for her instrument and the music she presents chronicles her pilgrimage via many different composers and widely varying styles in the century before Johann Sebastian’s Ciaccona that concludes the programme. We are introduced to Thomas Baltzar, Nicola Matteis, Heinrich Franz von Biber and Johann Paul von Westhoff played on a violin by Marieke Bodart after Stainer, and her bows are described as well – each one being listed beside the piece. For the later composers – including Vilsmayr, Pisendel and Telemann – she moves to her Klotz, made in Mittenwald in 1757. A third violin that we might have heard was stuck with the luthier during the lockdown.

The playing is elegant, committed and rhapsodic, and the storyline is intriguing. But whether this kind of reflective musing is what you are looking for in a CD that will be a long-time companion on your shelves is not a question I can answer.

I was glad to have heard it, and I suspect it might be inspiring for a young enthusiast, waiting to be captivated as Odile was when she was 14. If you have a grandchild or godchild or just know a wistful would-be young star violinist, give it a try. It might change their lives.

David Stancliffe

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Bach | Mendelssohn: The organ sonatas

CD cover Bach Mendelssohn Organ Sonatas


Hans-Eberhard Roß (Goll Organ of St Martin, Memmingen)
141:27 (2 CDs in a card triptych)
audite 23.447

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Teaching online has become a new art form, and the experienced teacher Hans-Eberhard Roß has hit on the idea of pairing the six Bach Trio Sonatas (BWV 525-530) with the six Mendelssohn Sonatas as a ‘kind of organ school’, interlacing Bach with Mendelssohn sonata by sonata and using the Goll organ in St Martin, Memmingen in June 2020 to demonstrate them.

The Goll organ was built in 1998 and the website www.audite.de gives some of Roß’ further notes on each movement of the Mendelssohn; only the basic specification of this four-manual organ is given in the liner notes. The organ feels as though it was conceived for the 19th-century French symphonic tradition, but Roß assures us that it is equally good for Mendelssohn and Bach.

He uses plenty of upperwork in the outer movements of the Bach sonatas and the generous acoustic in which the organ speaks does not detract from the clarity of his playing. Solo reeds are used to contrast with the flutes in the slow movements and, a chorus reed is even used for the LH of the Allegro in Sonata 2 in C minor, where, after an exceptionally well-registered and eloquent Largo, the 8’ pedal booms unpleasantly. In the Mendelssohn sonatas, it is the overall sound of the fortes that I find the organ lets him down. Here his brisk tempi, the bright trompette tone and the rich mixtures combine to make it feel a long way from Mendelssohn’s Berlin or the London for which his sonatas were conceived. English organs of the 1840s did not sound remotely like this, and Roß seems determined to display all this modern organ’s registrational possibilities as if to prove how much can be done to bring out the voices of the music before him – indeed in a note on the Audite website he specifically refers to the possibility of a large organ equipped with registrational aids being able to do just that: personally, I find it a distraction. It is like playing the 48 on a piano, where you can ‘bring out’ the returning fugue subject in case your hearers can’t spot it.

So although we can applaud the teacher’s desire to set the Bach and Mendelssohn sonatas side by side, I do not find the use of this instrument or the style of playing very convincing for either. Nor, in spite of his obvious skill and his pedagogical zeal, do I learn much from this pairing; except of course to have Mendelssohn’s debt to JSB underlined at every turn. The pedal solos, the complex fugal writing, even the sustained Bachian arpeggios in the Allegro assai vivace that concludes the First sonata (so reminiscent of the passagework that opens Komm, Heiliger Geist BWV 651) bring Mendelssohn’s debt to Bach vividly before us. This is a welcome reminder: but I doubt if that is what many readers of the EMR are looking for.

David Stancliffe