[dropcap]A[/dropcap]ny first recording of music by such a major figure as Claudio Monteverdi should be celebrated; the fact that his Scherzi Musicali (published by his brother, who also contributes two pieces, in 1607) have not previously made it on to disk is that 17 strophic arias sung in three parts but up to six sopranos and a single voice, separated by ritornelli in which the violinists and recorder player compete to add as many ornaments as they can, accompanied by keyboards, pluckers and a symphonia with drone, might be a challenging experience – and so it turned out. Enthusiastic as the singers are, and sweet as their voices might be, they should not have been persuaded to consent to allowing themselves to be recorded; I gain nothing by being hyper-critical, so will leave the review there. To be fair, though, I don’t think I ever want to hear another recording of the set – perhaps one or two pieces in the context of a more varied concert.
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Elena De Simone mezzo-soprano, Ensemble Il Mosaico
61:17
Tactus TC 690801
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]here are ten arias from eight different operas on this CD running between four minutes to well over eight, and they amply display Hasse’s gifts both in melodic terms but also in knowing the voice for which he was writing. While the objective of the project is noble enough (to bring Hasse’s music back to wider notice), the realisation may not have the desired effect. The problem is not with the performers, but rather with their number; with the best will in the world, a string quartet with violone and harpsichord cannot recreate the sound world of an orchestra, and a whole disc of just one singer and a string ensemble would struggle to sustain anyone’s imagination beyond a few arias – perhaps a few recitatives, or a couple of sinfonias from the operas with woodwinds and brass might have helped. I mean this not as criticism but as encouragement to continue exploring Hasse’s music but with a broader palette!
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[dropcap]D[/dropcap]uring the baroque period, it was customary for composers to set the same psalm texts many times as demanded by the liturgical requirements of Vespers services. This typically enterprising recording from Weser-Renaissance under Manfred Cordes brings us seven of the surviving settings of “In you, O Lord, I put my trust”, an especially poignant text for Rosenmüller, whose seemingly meteoric career in Leipzig was cut short in the early 1650s by scandal, and he was forced to live for nearly thirty years in exile. There are three solo versions (one each for soprano and tenor with a pair of violins and continuo, and one for alto with an additional pair of violas), two duets (soprano & alto, alto & tenor, each with violins and continuo), one for pairs of sopranos, tenors and violins, and finally a larger setting for five voices with five instruments. As always with this ensemble, the singing and playing are top notch, and the understanding of the architecture of the music, the pacing, the balance of individual voices and instruments is perfect. On the latter point, Cordes opts for violas da gamba for the middle parts with dulcian on the bottom and organ and chitarrone continuo. For all the praise I’ve lavished on the performances, however, the sources of the music (readily available online) reveal, for example, that the largest setting on the disc should have been much larger – two four-part choruses, one doubled by strings and crowned by a free violin line, the other reinforced by brass with a cornetto on top; perhaps the re-working was necessary on purely financial grounds, but surely it should be mentioned in the booklet notes. Would I rather have this rendition than none? Absolutely!
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Galanterie: John Schneiderman lute, Jeffrey Cohan flute, William Skeen cello
104:09 (2 CDs)
Hänssler Classic HC 15048
[dropcap]A[/dropcap]dam Falckenhagen (1697-1754) was one of the last important composers of lute music before the instrument went out of fashion. The CD liner notes written by Peter Danner provide interesting biographical information about Falckenhagen, and put his music into its historical context. In about 1726 Falckenhagen studied the lute with Silvius Leopold Weiss in Dresden, and he spent his life playing for various German aristocrats. From 1726 to 1732 he worked at the court in Weimar, first for Duke Wilhelm, and from 1728 for Duke Ernst August, to whom his Opera Nuova are dedicated. From 1732 to 1754 he worked for Princess Wilhelmine (1709-58) at Bayreuth. Wilhelmine was the sister of Frederick the Great. In spite of their militaristic father, they had had a musical childhood: she played the lute, and Frederick played the flute. Wilhelmine was keen to establish music-making at Bayreuth, and Falckenhagen would have often played for her.
Five of the six concertos of Falckenhagen’s Opera Nuova are in a major key (E, A, D, G, B flat) – just one in G minor – and are cheerful and easy to listen to. The style is galant, with tuneful melodies decorated on the flute with a plethora of apoggiaturas and trills. The harmony is fairly straightforward, with lots of tonic and dominant, and noticeably it lacks the polyphonic and harmonic complexity of Bach’s music. There are plenty of contrasts of texture characterising each movement, for example in the Largo of Concerto IV, there are long tonic pedals with repeated notes in the bass, very fast arpeggiated chords on the lute, occasional chirpy triplets on the flute, and passages for lute solo. Each Concerto consists of four movements: slow, fast, a short third movement (Tempo di Polonese), and a Minuetto (which has a long set of variations in Concerto IV).
The E major Concerto begins with an Andante, which is pleasant enough, although the repeated chords on the lute are all played the same, giving a plodding effect. The second movement, Allegretto, starts with a sprightly lute solo, and the other instruments join in later. There are some nice solo lute interludes in the Tempo di Polonese, and attractive countermelodies on the lute in the Minuetto alternativamente. There is a problem getting the right balance for the lute, because some of the time it takes a continuo role filling in chords over the bass, when it shouldn’t be too loud, but at other times it plays a countermelody to the flute, creating a texture more akin to a trio sonata, and then it needs to be heard clearly.
John Schneidermann produces some fast, invigorating solo passages in Un poco allegro of the Concerto in A major, with the dexterity and drive of a bluegrass banjo player (which he once was). However, I wonder if his bass strings are synthetic (rather than gut), because they ring on rather too long, and consequently lose some clarity. Jeffrey Cohan’s nimble fingers take their turn on the baroque flute, and with an exciting flurry of triplets towards the end of the movement, his part goes one notch faster than the lute’s.
There is a surprise in the Larghetto of Concerto III, where the soothing, soporific melody is interrupted by an unexpected third inversion dominant chord, leading to a kind of recitativo dialogue between the flute and lute. In this section the long bass notes are sustained sensitively by William Skeen on his gut-strung five-string cello. The lute solo of the following Allegro, though played with suitable panache, has a fast-moving bass line where the bass notes merge into an indistinct blur. Thomas Mace describes this effect as “Two [strings] Snarling together” on page 208 of Musick’s Monument. A practical solution (not Mace’s) would be to put some Blu-tack on the bass strings near the bridge, which eliminates excessive sustain. That aside, the movement races along well, with an energetic input from all three players. They seem to be having fun, and it is all very entertaining stuff. Wilhelmine would have loved it.
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Christoph Prégardien, Vox Orchester, Lorenzo Ghirlanda
66:51
dhm 1 90758 34122 4
BWV56, TWV 1: 983 & 1510, plus movements from instrumental music by Fasch, Handel & Telemann
[dropcap]L[/dropcap]ike any good actor at the height of their game, a good singer will inhabit and project their role with an intensity and intuitive understanding. This is what we encounter here, people at the very top of their game! Even before you hear a single note you can feel the care and attention in the overall presentation.
Christoph Prégardien and the incredibly fluent and reactive Vox orchester respond to these chosen works with consummate skill. These specially selected Passiontide cantatas by Telemann exude and suit the pathos and drama of this period. Interestingly, they match the composer’s own vocal range around his Frankfurt tenure (1712-1721) – we know this from his letter of application for the Kapellmeister post, where he speaks of his voice being “between a tenor and a bass… normally called a baritone”. If you missed Klaus Mertens on CPO back in 2009, and recently Philippe Jaroussky singing Telemann and Bach on Erato, then this recording will allow a partial revisit. The two disembodied “Ouvertures” by Fasch and Telemann left me wishing I could hear the whole works, and perhaps a Bach Sinfonia might have replaced the Handel? All in all, though, this is a quite superlative recording that meets the desires and wishes of any Baroquophile on the quest for excellence. The booklet notes by one of the fine oboists reveal how the career paths and musico-aesthetic orbits of these great composers crossed and intersected at given times. The music simply washes over you with a purity and quality many seek to match.
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[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his selection of music from around the fringes of the North Sea for a mixed consort of wind and stringed instruments includes some good-going dance music by William Brade and Anthony Holborne, as well as fine music by Antonio Bertali, Thomas Baltzar, Melchior Schmidt, Johann Sommer and Johann Schop. The programme emphasizes the musical links promoted by the lively Hanseatic trade network, but at the same time the musical diversity cultivated within the lands of the League. In Echo under the direction of cornettist Gawain Glenton play with tremendous authority and musicality, bringing out the diverse colours of the music they have chosen. To my taste, the inclusion of a contemporary work by Andrew Keeling, Northern Souls, which seems to owe more to Aaron Copland than the music around it, is a bit of self-indulgence, which adds little to the programme. In Echo are a new signing to Delphian Records, and on the basis of this fine CD they are quite an acquisition. We look forward to their exploration of further twilit corners of musical Europe.
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Music from Handel’s London Theatre Orchestra
Olwen Foulkes recorder, Nathaniel Mander harpsichord, Carina Drury cello, Toby Carr theorbo, Tabea Debus bass recorder
64:04
Barn Cottage Records bcr019
Music by Blow, Castrucci, Corelli, Geminiani, Handel, Giuseppe Sammartini & anon
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his intriguing and imaginative programme takes as its starting point concerts given by recorder players prior to and after the arrival in London of Handel. Jacques Paisible had popularized the instrument towards the end of the 17th century, and Olwen Foulkes makes the reasonable assumption that instrumental concerts from then onwards would have featured popular works transcribed for recorder and continuo. Assuming that many of these transcriptions would have remained in repertoire, it is not inconceivable that Handel could indeed have directed such diverse programmes. Olwen Foulkes is a lovely recorder player, with a fulsome tone and very musical approach on a range of recorders including descants, treble and voice flute. Her phrasing and effortless decoration are exemplary and extremely persuasive, and she is ably supported by a range of other fine musicians. This barn-storming performance will delight recorder players everywhere, but is also of much wider interest as a window on a period when musicians happily ‘borrowed’ extensively from each other to satisfy public demand.
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Guillermo Turina cello, Eugenia Boix soprano, Tomoko Matsuoka harpsichord
[Cantatas and Sinfonie di violoncello a solo]
71:54
Cobra Records COBRA 0063
[dropcap]B[/dropcap]orn and raised in Venice, Giacomo Facco took a post with the Spanish Spinola family who rose to power in Sicily before being expelled and returning to Spain, where Facco joined them for the rest of his life. The present CD selects music from his major publications consisting of cantatas for soprano, cello and continuo, interspersed with sinfonias for cello and continuo. While the cantatas he published while working in Italy are a little pedestrian, the later Spanish-period works sound more convincing. However, none of the cantatas sound as interesting as Facco’s innovative and engaging sinfonias for cello and harpsichord. This is partly due on the present CD to Guillermo Turino’s exciting technique on the Baroque cello, which brings these latter works to life, and contrasts with Eugenia Boix’s rather swooping accounts of the cantatas, which I found a little wearing after a while. Frankly, it is hard to account for the enormous enthusiasm shown by Facco’s fans, including his first biographer Uberto Zanolli, who entitled his book ‘Giacomo Facco : Master of Kings’. To my ear, Facco’s idiom is very conventional, and it came as no surprise to read in the notes that he was sidelined from his final post at the Spanish Court in Madrid by the arrival of the great Farinelli.
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Passacaglia Baroque ensemble
70:08
Barn Cottage Records bcr017
Transcriptions of Vivaldi by Bach, Chédeville & Passacaglia
[dropcap]P[/dropcap]assacaglia are renowned for their wonderfully passionate and detailed playing, and for their custom of arranging Baroque music to suit their instrumental ensemble. This CD illustrates both these characteristics. It features arrangements by later composers – J. S. Bach and Nicolas Chédeville – of Vivaldi’s music, which then undergoes a further transformation at the hands of Passacaglia, who re-instrument it all over again. While I love their lively playing, I find that some of their arrangements have something of a ‘mock-Baroque’ feeling to them, with some of the instruments, particularly the recorders, being asked to do rather unidiomatic things in rather unidiomatic keys. Of course, in the hands of the wonderfully virtuosic Annabel Knight and Louise Bradbury, the playing is never less than superbly accomplished, but sometimes it all sounds a little contrived. The group’s rearrangements of Chédeville’s transcriptions for musette or hurdy-gurdy of two of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, where a hurdy-gurdy is ‘enhanced’ by recorders and a violin along with continuo instruments, seems to me to be neither one thing or another – or rather a whole new thing conjured up by Passacaglia. We have all heard the Vivaldi original and I have heard Chédeville’s transcription on a hurdy-gurdy, both of which are very effective, but what is this? I am always puzzled by Baroque ensembles who feel bound to create their own versions of Baroque music, given that there is such a treasury of music from the period out there which has never seen the light of day. You will enjoy the wonderfully fresh playing on this CD, but I must say I prefer my Baroque music less comprehensively ‘under cover’.
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Manuel Staropoli recorders & Baroque flute, Massimo Marchese theorbo
228:18 (4 CDs in a case)
Brilliant Classics 95595
[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n this four-CD account of the complete works of Robert de Visée, the performers have taken creative though entirely justifiable liberties with the instrumentation to involve instruments such as the recorder and Baroque flute known to have been in vogue in Versailles at the time and to give the music the genuine sound of chamber music. The resulting performances are pleasing and reveal in exhaustive detail de Visée’s talents as a composer. With very little known about him as an individual, we rely on the music to characterize both the period and its composer, and this it does very well. If perhaps four CDs of this music could be regarded as ‘peak de Visée’, we should remember that it would never have been performed en masse like this, rather whiling away Royal ennuies interspersed with other solo, chamber and larger-scale music. Given the limitations of the music and the ensemble, the performers do a fine job alternating the instruments and bringing the music charmingly to life. Just kick off your dancing pumps, hang up your wig, channel your inner Roi Soleil and sit back and enjoy this never less than elegant Musique de la Chambre du Roi. For more active listeners, the brief programme notes find room to list the instruments used as well as the few facts that are known about de Visée.
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