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A Lute by Sixtus Rauwolf

Jakob Lindberg
81:50
BIS-2265 SACD
Music by Dufault, Kellner, Mouton, “Mr Pachelbel”, Reusner, Weiss

Jakob Lindberg’s first CD featuring the lute made c. 1590 by Sixtus Rauwolf, is an anthology of music by French and German composers. It begins with a sombre Padoana by Esias Reusner (1636-79), which lies low on the instrument and is reminiscent of English lute pavans such as those by Daniel Bacheler. There follow two suites by two of the most important French lutenist composers in the 17th century, François Dufault (before 1604-c.1672) and Charles Mouton (1626-after 1699). The clarity of the Rauwolf lute is heard to good effect in Mouton’s jolly Canaries ‘Le Mouton’, where a high treble exchanges musical ideas with a lower voice, supported by occasional notes in the bass, giving the impression that three instruments are being played.

Towards the end of the 17th century, lute music waned in France, but it continued to wax in Germany. Lindberg plays a suite by David Kellner (c.1670-1748), who for much of his life worked as an organist in Stockholm. The suite begins with Campanella (presto assai), presumably an imitation of bells, but nothing like the change-ringing of Fabian Stedman and others which would have been heard in England by that time. The alternation of thumb and a finger creates a precise sound verging on the mechanical. Gone are the subtle suggestions of melody by earlier French composers. The old style brisé where melodies and bass lines were broken imaginatively into a succession of single notes, with Kellner they become more a predictable succession of broken chords, and if there is a slow-moving melody, each note is followed by an off-beat on a higher string creating a rather irritating drone-like effect. His Sarabande, on the other hand, has a charming melody, which is divided effectively into single notes for the double repeat. Interestingly, apart from cadential hemiolas, there are no notes stressed on the second beat of the bar, a feature which characterised earlier sarabandes; Kellner’s is more like a slow waltz. Next comes a suite by ‘Mr Pachelbel’, possibly Johann Pachelbel (c.1653-1706), best known today for having written a Canon. According to Tim Crawford’s liner notes, Pachelbel’s Allemande ‘L’Amant mal content’ is based on ‘L’Amant malheureux’ by the French lutenist Jacques de Gallot (d. c.1690). The CD ends with a fine suite in A major by Silvius Leopold Weiss (1687-1750), eight movements in all, including a Gigue played with tasteful panache, and a long Ciacona, with contrasting variations.

Stewart McCoy

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Jan Antonín Losy: note d’oro

Jakob Lindberg
82:15
BIS-2462 SACD (ecopak)

Jan Antonín Losy  (c.1650-1721) is arguably one of the most important composers for the 11-course lute, at least according to the frontispiece of LeSage de Richée’s Cabinet der Lauten (Breslau, 1695), where a pile of books has Losy’s music on top, above books by Gaultier, Mouton and Dufaut. I have always admired his music, and played some every day in 2019 without exception. His compositions are satisfying to play, pleasing to the ear, with well-sructured melodic lines, interesting harmonies, and considerable variety. There is a lightness of texture resulting from a fair amount of style brisé. In 1715, the Prague Kapellmeister, Gottfried Heinrich Stöltzel, described how Losy would savour a particular dissonance, calling it “una nota d’oro” (a golden note), hence the title of Jakob Lindberg’s CD.

The CD begins with a suite in A minor, compiled by Lindberg from various sources, including a Prelude adapted from one for baroque guitar, and a Courante and Double with an unobtrusive touch of notes inégales and a surprising secondary dominant towards the end. Lindberg’s playing is most gratifying – lively yet unhurried, with well-shaped phrases allowing the harmonies to follow their logical course to a final cadence, which is almost invariably decorated with dissonance on the tonic. An Aria is played at a very sedate speed, giving time for delicate ornaments to be heard clearly, followed by a thoughtful Gavotte enhanced by what I assume are Lindberg’s own additional notes for repeats. The suite ends with a lively two-voice Caprice, where fast running notes are shared between treble and bass. Next comes a suite in F major, the seven selected movements long known to modern lute players from Emil Vogel’s Z Loutnových Tabulatur Českého Baroka (Prague: Editio Supraphon, 1977). After a slow, stately start, the overture breaks into three fast beats in a bar, developing a theme of three crotchets and four quavers, before returning briefly to the slower speed of the beginning. Then comes a restful Allemande with much imitation, nice little variants (presumably Lindberg’s own) for repeats, and a passage of parallel tenths played brisé for the repeat. The overall pitch then drops for a Courante, which canters along in continuous quavers in style brisé, so that in the second section there are only three places where more than one note is played at a time. The piece ends with a descending sequence, which Lindberg decorates for a petite reprise. In contrast the following Sarabande has a thicker texture, with many rolled chords. Its second section begins with a surprising chord of C minor, played on the lower reaches of the lute – its highest note (g) is on the fourth course. As with so many of these pieces, Lindberg tastefully adds myriad extra notes to enliven repeats.

There is just one place in the whole of this delightful CD where I think something is not quite right. In the Sarabande of the Suite in D minor, the F major chord at the start of bar 13 should really be in root position, but Lindberg plays it as a second inversion with the note c in the bass, and does the same for the repeat. I wonder if his edition has that note accidentally notated one line too low in the tablature.

With suites in A minor, F major, G major, D minor, G minor and B flat major, ending with a Chaconne in F major, there is much to enjoy. Apart from Lindberg’s masterful playing, there is one thing which makes it all rather special: his lute was built c. 1590 by Sixtus Rauwolf of Augsburg, probably as a seven- or eight-course instrument, and surprisingly it still has its original soundboard. It was later adapted to be an 11-course lute, and was restored a few years ago by Michael Lowe, Stephen Gottlieb and David Munro. Its sound is well balanced, with clear bright notes in the treble, and bass notes which are not too loud and do not sustain too long. With its variety of tone colours, it helps make the music sing, and must undoubtedly be an inspiration to play. Note d’oro indeed.

Stewart McCoy

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Secret Fires of Love

Daniel Thomson, Terry McKenna, Thomas Leininger, Studio Rhetorica, directed by Robert Toft
65:11
Talbot Productions TP1701

This recital offers a rather lovely programme of English and Italian music from the early 17th century (Dowland, Monteverdi, etc.) and the later decades when ‘the Baroque period’ was in full swing (Purcell, Albinoni, etc.). I rather liked (especially through headphones) the deliberately intimate recorded sound and the restrained performing forces. I doubt the stylistic credentials of some of the continuo playing, on both lute and harpsichord, but it is the vocal style that will excite or appal (or even both) most listeners. I offer a quotation from the blurb:

 ‘[The singer] uses techniques of rhetorical delivery to re-create the natural style of performance listeners from the era would have heard… This requires him to alter the written scores substantially and his dramatic singing combines rhetoric and music in ways that have not been heard since the Renaissance and Baroque eras.

Passing swiftly over these rather extravagant claims which I think many might question, I suppose the singing might be summed up as focussing very much on the word and micro-phrase rather than any sense of a ‘line’ and not all listeners will warm to this and other details – the portamenti, for instance. (I was reminded several times of the Sting/Dowland experiment, which wasn’t actually all bad, and some aspects of Alfred Deller’s performances.) It’s a very intense listen and I’m not absolutely sure that I enjoyed it, but it certainly commanded my attention and I do expect to return to at least small groups of items for pleasure rather than duty.

David Hansell

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Monteverdi: Vespro della Beata Vergine

La Tempête, Simon-Pierre Bestion
142:07 (2 CDs in a card folder)
Alpha Classics ALPHA 552

This original take on the Monteverdi 1610 Vespers will not be everybody’s cup of tea, if only because the standard parts of the Vespers that people expect to hear are not performed to a standard that we expect in HIP recordings today – the vocal singing in the psalms for example has sopranos singing with a particularly ‘French-style’ vibrato, and his somewhat wayward scorings – adding and subtracting instrumental colour to illuminate a word here and there is more reminiscent of orchestration as practised by Berlioz or Elgar. Indeed, I have not heard such re-imagined scoring – albeit with period instruments – since I heard Walter Göhr conduct his edition in Westminster Abbey in 1959. 

The main interest in this recording – and I have over a dozen recordings from the last two decades alone – must be in the juxtaposition of the supplementary material alongside Monteverdi’s. The opening Versicle and Response, set by Monteverdi to a re-worked version of the toccata that acts as a curtain-raiser to the Orfeo, is treated – as in that kind of modern cookery that presents a deconstructed rhubarb crumble for a pudding – as a series of elements. We have a rough falso-bordone version sung in a style that is a cross between how you might sing the naïve chant setings of Père Gouzes and the Dorset West Gallery tradition. Then follows the Toccata directly from the Orfeo, and finally the 1610 version with voices, strings and exotic wind, but no cornetti.  The faux-bourdon settings he takes from an anonymous xvii century manuscript preserved in the Bibliothèque Inguimbertine at Carpentras in Provence. When asked whether the Vespers could have been sung in this way in the period when they were composed, Bestion replies in the dialogue interview that is his apologia, ‘No, not at all! This is a complete re-imagining, adding in instrumental parts, and also singing the same sections of text twice’. This recording is a newly imagined event, turning the Monteverdi Vespers into the framework for a liturgical happening underscored by childhood memories of summer holidays with the family, staying in a monastery and being overwhelmed by eves-dropping on the great monastic chain of prayer.

So after a plainsong antiphon, sung by a single voice in a way that has echoes of Near-Eastern monody, and a faux-bourdon setting from the Carpentras library, Dixit Dominus by Monteverdi begins with strings, the voices coming in as if they were vocal entries in a Gibbons or Hooper verse anthem. ‘I set about rewriting the instrumental parts’, he says, ‘. . . to reflect all the diverse colours of the orchestra.’ These arrangements are fine in a way: a string ensemble decorates the bare bars of the bass’s Gloria at the end of Dixit like an Purcell viol fantasia on a single note; and sometimes he repeats a section that he likes, as in the triple section in the Gloria of Laudate pueri, which he runs instrumentally first before adding the voices – but the vocal style chosen for the Monteverdi elements in this production seems to owe little either to the rougher faux-bourdon style – sometimes pitched unbelievably low as in the setting of Laudate pueri – or to the ‘supple, slightly androgynous voice’ of Eugènie de Mey. Instead they seem firmly anchored in a slightly dated style of singing that uses quite a lot of modern techniques, like a good deal of vibrato in the upper voices.

Modern in conception too is the treatment of the foundation instruments. Harpsichord, lutes, harps and organ are added and subtracted for effect, providing a degree of distracting restlessness that steals attention from the setting of the text. Tempi are varied for no apparent reason – in Laetatus sum the running bass motif, repeated a number of time before the Gregorian intonation is heard (instrumentally at first), is taken at a faster pace than the much slower even-numbered verses: where has the concept of tactus gone?

I found the ritornello, trilli and all, for a pair of trombones that opens Duo Seraphim before the tenors take over equally odd, even if it no longer surprised me. Nisi goes at a cracking pace, helped by the rhythm section of ‘a thousand twangling instruments’ – though I think Christine Pluhar’s L’Arpeggiata does that kind of excitement better.

The second CD opens with a ricercar by Fresobaldi on Sancta Maria ora pro nobis to introduce Audi cælum, which has some of the best singing so far till cornetti roulades introduce ‘omnes’, and we are galloping off in a breakneck tripla. Benedicta es begins with single voices, till the other singers, and then the complete chorus angelorum catch the theme and pick up their cornets and sackbuts.

Lauda has just brass for the two SAB choirs with the tenors’ intonation at the start, and I found the proportions in the Sonata convincing musically, if unjustifiable theoretically. Ave maris stella has a free version of the plainsong for verses 2 and 3, and a home-embroidered counterpoint for the ‘solo’ verses. Never was there such a self-indulgent flattened 7th in the Amen.

By contrast, the Magnificat was almost straight, except for a mesmerising triple echo in the Gloria. At last I began to see what Bestion was aiming for, though as readers who have persevered thus far will have gathered, it’s not the Monteverdi Vespro of 1610.

If you are anything like me, you will be intrigued and repelled in equal measure. So try and listen to a few tracks before you buy: it’s not exactly what it says on the tin!

David Stancliffe

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Bach: Sonatas & Partitas for solo violoncello piccolo

Mario Brunello
161:00 (2 CDs in a card folder)
Arcana A469

First we had Rachel Podger playing the ‘cello suites on the violin, and now we have the cellist Mario Brunello playing the Sei Soli – the sonatas and partitas for solo violin (BWV 1001-6) – not on a violin, but on a four-string violoncello piccolo made Filippo Fasser in Brescia in 2017. The model is an instrument by Antonio and Girolamo Amati of Cremona dated between 1600 and 1610; the pitch is A=415 and the bows and strings are all detailed in the booklet which contains a mood piece entitled ‘An unexpected gust of wind’, an essay dated 2019 by Peter Wollny ‘Johann Sebastian Bach and the violoncello piccolo’, and finally Brunello’s article on playing the Sei Soli on the violoncello piccolo ‘A looking-glass reading’ during which he observes that while a violinist naturally strokes the highest string first, with a cellist it is the other way round: the texture builds up from the bass line.

In the fugal writing in particular, this gives a different perspective to the polyphony that Bach creates from the single instrument, and listening to these performances of the Sei Solo is a richly rewarding experience, offering a new take on Bach’s artistry, and in particular on the way in which a single instrument can, and in this case does, create a complete fugal texture. I was expecting some of the lighter dance movements in the Partitas to feel heavier and lumpier, but this is not the case. The bottom-up bowing seems to lighten the texture, and let the strong/weak pairing of notes find a natural sense of being placed just right. In addition, the baritone register of these pieces, likened by Brunello to a counter tenor’s take on music we are used to hearing in a different register, seems less anguished and tormented than many versions we are used to hearing.

The instrument sounds responsive: its light, singing tone fills the space in which the recordings were made – the Villa Parco Bolasco in Castelfranco in the Veneto – and is far removed from the grainy, hard-worked sound of Peter Wispelwey’s ‘cello in his later recording of the Six Suites, for example.  A 4-string violoncello piccolo (without the bottom string of a 5-string one) is pitched exactly an octave below a violin, so although the register sounds strange at first, by the time we are into the D minor partita, the great ciacconna sounds as if it was always meant to be pitched there, and because, I suspect, of the slacker bow, the chords of the D minor chaconne (in BWV 1004) and the great fugue in the C major (BWV 1005) to take two obviously ‘polyphonic’ numbers sound as convincing as I have ever heard on a violin.

So like Rachel Podger’s ‘cello suites, I love these versions. The novel tessitura offers both challenges and insights, and I ended up after several listenings thinking that this was a more comfortable pitch for the music. And Bach did re-pitch his favourite material. He made several different versions of, for example, the resoundingly bass/baritone tessitura of cantata BWV 82 Ich habe genug, transposing it up both for soprano and for alto and altering the instrumentation with each reworking, notwithstanding the obvious identification of the bass singer with old Simeon in the Temple. In the same way I hope that this version of the Sei Soli will find a ready following among those who can get hold of such an instrument, and appeal to listeners as a proper reworking of well-known music that offers new but valid insights.

Singers as well as string players would do well to listen to this recording and to ponder what this might mean for the way they sing their Bach. And I urge violinists as well as ‘cello players to listen and learn from this enormously rewarding performance; I have learnt a lot.

David Stancliffe

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J. S. Bach: Soprano Arias & Swedish folk chorales

Maria Keohane, Camerata Kilkenny
58:10
Maya Recordings MCD1901

In the booklet, Kate Hearne writes that ‘the idea of pairing Bach’s music with Dala Chorales is an idea that has been with me for a long time’. 

Dala chorales come from a region in central Sweden where the first official psalm book in the Lutheran tradition was published in 1695, influenced as much by folk song as by the memories of what had been sung in the pre-Reformation masses. A number of these free chorale-like tunes are sung here by Maria Keohane, paired with seven Bach arias for soprano with obligato violin played by Maya Homburger, appearing here with Sarah McMahon and Malcolm Proud as Camerata Kilkenny.

The recording was made in the Propsteikirche Sankt Gerold in Austria, a small former Benedictine monastery. Details of the project, and how the performance was prepared are sketchy, but the booklet manages to convey the slightly folksy, Nordic, tree-spirit world that the Dalakorals conjure up.

The playing and singing is of a high standard as you would expect from the starry Swedish Maria Keohane and the Swiss violinist Maya Homburger. All the arias are just for soprano voice, violin and bc, and have all the elegance of chamber music, with perfectly matched and balanced partners listening to one another. This is how arias should be sung – not as if they were solos with an accompaniment in the background. Whether the pairing of the arias with the Dalakorals works for you I cannot predict, but you would not be sorry to have heard the Bach.

David Stancliffe

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Toccata from Claudio Merulo to Johann Sebastian Bach

Andrea Buccarella harpsichord
59:24
Ricercar RIC 407

This young harpsichordist was the winner of the Musica Antiqua Bruges competition in 2018, resulting in this, his first recording. He has chosen a stimulating programme which traces the development of the toccata from Claudio Merulo to J. S. Bach, via Sweelinck, Frescobaldi, Froberger, Buxtehude and others. In the process he shows how enduring the genre was while pointing up each composer’s individual style. This is helped by his use of four different harpsichords: small and large Italian-style instruments for the earlier repertory, a Hans Ruckers double-manual copy for Weckmann, Buxthude and Reincken, and a John Heinrich Gräbner copy for Bach. He uses flexible tempi and emphasises the improvisatory quality of much of the music, while never losing the pulse. Among his fine performances I was struck by Giovanni Picchi’s toccata from the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book and that by Michelangelo Rossi with its adventurous chromatic scales – but all have aspects of interest. Bach’s D major toccata (BWV 912) is given a masterly execution which brings out the composer’s youthful exuberance, particularly in an almost aggressive approach to the opening flourishes. Recording quality is excellent, with the instruments given a close-up presence, while Buccarella’s informative sleeve notes help enlighten the listening experience. This is a highly-assured debut and I look forward to hearing more.

Noel O’Regan

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Handel: Samson

[Joshua Ellicott Samson, Jess Dandy Micah, Matthew Brook Manoa, Vitali Rozynko Harapha, Sophie Bevan Delila, Hugo Hymas An Israelite, A Philistine, Messenger, Mary Bevan A virgin, An Israelite woman, A Philistine woman, Fflur Wyn A virgin, A Philistine woman, Tiffin Boys’ Choir, directed by James Day], Dunedin Consort, John Butt
204:14 (3 CDs in a cardboard box)
Linn CKD 599

In some ways the most remarkable thing about this recording is that it exists at all. Not many projects requiring a week’s recording time make it to disc these days so congratulations and thanks to those who have provided the funding and/or taken the financial risk, for it really is a major undertaking that requires eight soloists; additional singers for the chorus including trebles for the top line; and an orchestra in which horns, trumpets, oboes and bassoon join a relatively large body of strings and the keyboard continuo. And the choruses were all recorded twice! The discs include Handel’s standard scoring of adults with the boys adding richness to the top line, but also available for download is a performing option which Handel seems to have used from time to time – ‘just’ the soloists singing together with an extra ripieno alto to balance the sections.

The booklet, too, is pretty lavish though in English only. We are offered two excellent essays – on the work itself and on performing issues, the full text (and there’s a lot of it) and the usual performers’ credits. I do wish that these (for the singers, at least) weren’t quite so formulaic: only two get beyond the standard lists of prizes, roles and conductors.

Few of us will know Samson as well as we should – a shame, for it gives us Handel on fine form not only in the content of individual movements but in the way in which he subverts our musical expectations to engage and re-engage our attention. The ‘plot’ is a sequence of tableaux and philosophising rather than pure narrative drama and the music makes considerable demands on the performers, not least of stamina. Joshua Ellicott as Samson draws us in to his world, rather than shouting about it, and really does sing most beautifully. He and all his colleagues exhibit some fine diction, especially in recitative – and it’s not often I find that I want to say that. I do think that all the singers have moments when their vibrato gets away from them but this is less of an issue than on many CDs I have recently reviewed for EMR. The orchestra is also a classy act and John Butt has a sure hand in matters of musical pacing.

So if you don’t know Samson, you should make this your way in. This release is unlikely to be surpassed – or even competed with – for some time.

David Hansell

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Dandrieu: Magnificats Vol. 1

Jean-Baptiste Robin Grandes Orgues 1710 (Chapelle Royale – Versailles)
70:51
Versailles Spectacles CVS023

With all due respect to both composer and performer, this CD is all about this organ though the combination of the music and the instrument for which it was arguably written is also a point of some significance and interest.

The Versailles organ was developed by three generations of the Clicquot family during the 18th century (1711, 1736, 1762) and was spared damage and removal during the revolution. However, work in 1872 and 1935 changed its character to the point at which a new spirit of ‘authenticity’ required complete dismantling in 1989 and a comprehensive rebuild to restore the 1711 voices. These are distributed over four manuals and pedal and can deliver all the characteristic registrations of the Classical French school. As one of the resident organ team, Jean-Baptiste Robin understands the instrument perfectly though doesn’t quite give us the full tour. Like most modern players he is not quite brave enough to include the tremblant fort in the Grand jeu, though if that wouldn’t work on this instrument where could it?

The music – 33 movements averaging about 2 minutes each – is a mixture of liturgical styles (it would have been good to include the chant for at least one of the Magnificats) and more ‘popular’ sets of variations on carol tunes, together with a few odds and ends. It’s all attractive, and at times positively imposing, and is given sympathetic and stylish performances by J-BR. I don’t always warm to his approach to inégalité, though what he does is a perfectly reasonable choice from the range of options.

The booklet (in French, English and German), notwithstanding a few lumpy translation moments, is luxurious with notes on the music, player and instrument and several striking pictures. A further release will include Dandrieu’s transcriptions for organ of his own chamber compositions. Let’s hope we don’t have to wait too long for this sequel, and fingers crossed for the tremblant fort!

David Hansell

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Jean Baptiste Loeillet: Trio Sonatas

Epoca Barocca
61:10
cpo 555 143-2

Sometimes it’s enough to write music that is well crafted, if not especially striking, and then get someone to play it with sensitivity, style and a sense of purpose. Jean Baptiste Loeillet did just that and in Epoca Barocca he has found his ‘someone’. Arguably, these trios provide pleasure for the players rather than excitement for the listener, but if you can experience enjoyment without excitement then this is for you. The balance between flute and oboe is good, the musical relationship between them intimate and complementary and all aspects of the performance are delicately judged. With one possible exception. I’d have been quite happy to hear the whole programme with just cello and harpsichord on the continuo line. Here we have from time to time and in addition to those, bassoon, organ and theorbo. The music doesn’t need these further colours, however: there is more than enough attractiveness in the top lines. I also found myself wondering how often a bassoon was actually used as a continuo instrument in chamber music.

The booklet (in German and English) offers a good and informative essay about the music and the basic information about the ensemble.

David Hansell

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