Tag: Baroque

Bach / Telemann: Cantatas for Baritone

Post author By EMR2015
Post date June 3, 2018
No Comments on Bach / Telemann: Cantatas for Baritone

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.

David Bellinger

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Tags Baroque

Recording

Music in a Cold Climate: Sounds of Hansa Europe

Post author By EMR2015
Post date May 23, 2018
No Comments on Music in a Cold Climate: Sounds of Hansa Europe

In Echo, Gawain Glenton
67:32
Delphian DCD34206

[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.

D. James Ross

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Tags Baroque, Chamber music

Recording

Directed by Handel

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.

D. James Ross

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Tags Baroque, Chamber music

Recording

Facco: Master of Kings

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.

D. James Ross

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Tags Baroque, Chamber music

Recording

Vivaldi Undercover

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’.

D. James Ross

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Tags Baroque, Chamber music

Recording

De Visée: La Musique de la Chambre du Roy [Complete]

Post author By EMR2015
Post date May 21, 2018
No Comments on De Visée: La Musique de la Chambre du Roy [Complete]

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.

D. James Ross

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Tags Baroque, Chamber music

Recording

Larmes de Résurrection: Music by Schütz and Schein

Post author By EMR2015
Post date May 21, 2018
No Comments on Larmes de Résurrection: Music by Schütz and Schein

La Tempête, Simon-Pierre Bestion
77:18
Alpha 394

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his account of Schütz’s Historia der Auferstehung Jesu Christi intercut with items from Johann Hermann Schein’s Israelsbrünnlein is not without its controversial aspects. Firstly the idea of presenting the music by the two composers in alternating numbers, one piece often emerging seamlessly from the previous one, is a radical idea. I can’t think the music would ever have been performed in this form at the time, but to my mind it works very well. Also controversial is the choice of the Lebanese singer Georges Abdallah for the Evangelist in the Schütz. He is described as a ‘chantre Byzantin’ and decorates Schütz’s simple recitative with an encrustation of decorative ornaments in the manner of Byzantine chant. Again, there will be those for whom this crosses a red line, but I have to say I found that Schütz’s rather long workaday recits were remarkably animated by this unorthodox (or rather orthodox in its truest sense) approach. The accompanying instruments in both the Schütz and Schein were wonderfully sonorous and expressive, and not backward in decorating their lines and even graphically evoking the dramatic quakes, storms and other circumstances of the text. This is an account which has been much thought about and meticulously prepared and, while I can see that certain aspects are difficult to justify academically, I found the resulting performance powerful, expressive and musically convincing. The wonderfully warm acoustic of the Chapel Royal at Versailles enhances the sound, and I found myself drawn into a remarkably involving account of this great music. My only two gripes are that the Schütz is not performed in its entirety, and that the programme note is in the annoying form of an interview with the director – I find that the disembodied interviewer never asks the questions I would like to have answered.

D. James Ross

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Tags Baroque, Choral music

Recording

Bach: Magnificat; Handel: Dixit Dominus

Post author By EMR2015
Post date May 13, 2018
No Comments on Bach: Magnificat; Handel: Dixit Dominus

Vox Luminis, Lionel Meunier
61:22
Alpha Classics Alpha 370

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his performance couples two five-voice – but otherwise very different – baroque favourites on Vox Luminis’ latest CD. Handel’s Dixit Dominus was recorded in Begijnhofkerk, Belgium in January 2017 and the Bach Magnificat in the Waalse Kerk, Amsterdam in July.

Dixit Dominus dates from 1707, and is performed here with ten singers (two to a part) and five-part strings (3.3.2.2.2.1) with organ at the then Roman pitch of A=392. The photograph of the recording shows the arc of singers facing the strings, with the cellos in the centre in front of the organ and contrabass, and the upper strings to each side. In the Magnificat, they use the substantial Christian Müller organ in Waalse Kerk in Amsterdam, but there is no photograph to show how the forces are deployed. In their live performance in St John’s Smith Square last December, the organist was hidden behind the centrally placed organ, and the two groups of SSATB singers radiated outwards on a single plinth from the basses in the middle with the flutes and oboes in the centre of the orchestra, surrounded by the 3.3.2.2.1 strings. The trumpets were placed to the treble side of the organ and the timpani to the bass. Even when miked for a recording, how the singers and players stand in relation to each other is clearly important in this attentive and well-rehearsed ensemble, where the only directing is done by Lionel Meunier raising his (full) score as he breathes. If you listen carefully, you can hear the corporate breath taken just before the start of track 12 of the Bach Magnificat, the Gloria Patri. Even live, the balance seemed fine, and in St John’s the Bach was complemented by two earlier Magnificats – Pachelbel and Kuhnau.

In this kind of music-making, everyone takes responsibility not just for their own line, but for the ensemble; so singers and players alike breathe as one. The blend and balance are astonishingly good, and even when the whole ensemble is engaged, every stroke from the leader’s bow or beat from the timpani is alert to this corporate breath. The singers betray no anxiety about being heard among so many instruments, so there are no nasty pushes on notes tied over to the next bar or wobbles from those voices who suspect that they may not be heard, that disfigure so many performances. The singers’ prime task is to deliver the text and articulate it, while the instruments fill out the tone and underline the changes in mood and colour – even the Müller organ, one of whose Principal ranks we hear so effectively in Quia fecit in the Magnificat.

For an illustration of balance, listen to how the strings and organ let the singer breathe in Et exultavit in the Magnificat without any sense of artificiality or hold-up in the rhythm, and then note the contrast between Stefanie True in Et exultavit and the matchless but quite different Zsuzsi Toth in Quia respexit which leads without a break into the five-part omnes generationes, the subject of the sentence coming at the end in the Latin for emphasis: ecce enim ex hoc beatam me dicent omnes generationes. In this performance we have no sudden change in the marked tempo Adagio as we are used to, with omnes generationes going off at a gallop, divorced from the rest of the sentence as if it were a different number. Perhaps it will surprise you as it did me, but the more I listen to it, the more sense it makes. There are no other surprises, and the singers when performing alone or in duets or trios sing within their comfort zone so there are no overt histrionics from attention-seeking would-be stars.

This balanced elegance is true of the Handel as well, where vocal agility and the ability to blend with your fellow singers is a sine qua non. The vocal sound is sharp and incisive and a perfect complement to the five-part strings. The two sopranos in De torrente in via and the lead into the Gloria Patri are stunning if you want to take a brief snapshot of why this CD is so splendid. As well as enjoying Vox Luminis’ wonderful sound, I learn something each time I listen to them. I thoroughly recommend this disc.

David Stancliffe

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Tags Baroque, Choral music

Recording

Bach: Sonatas for flute and harpsichord

Post author By EMR2015
Post date May 13, 2018
No Comments on Bach: Sonatas for flute and harpsichord

Stephen Schultz baroque flute, Jory Vinikour harpsichord
55:18
Music & Arts CD-1295
BWV1020 (attrib), 1031 (attrib), 1030, 1032

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his is another very good recording of the Bach Flute and Harpsichord Sonatas to go alongside the Naxos CD made by the Finnish duo Pauliinia Fred and Aapo Häkkinen that I reviewed in October 2017. Both CDs contain BWV 1030 in B minor and 1032 in A major, the well-authenticated sonatas whose autograph copies can be dated to 1736, and both have 1031, the accomplished and melodious sonata in E-flat that seems to be a reworking of a Dresden trio by Quantz (QV 2:35) by someone in Bach’s circle. This CD excludes some of the works for flute and simple continuo (1034 in E minor and 1035 in E Major) from the Naxos CD but adds BWV 1020 in G minor, almost invariably attributed to C. P. E. Bach.

The playing is – again – exceptional. Schultz’s tone on his Palanca copy by Martin Wenner is clean and vibrato-free, so his ornaments have all the more force. And the balance of the instruments – with the harpsichordist’s right hand never obscured or overshadowed – is excellent. The harpsichord is a 2010 copy by John Phillips of Berkley CA after an instrument by J. H. Grabner from Dresden in 1722. The give and take is seamless and the tempi never extreme. This is a good advertisement for period instrument performance in the Bay Area of California, even if it needed crowd-funding to make it possible.

David Stancliffe

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Tags Baroque, Chamber music

Recording

Vivaldi: Gloria

[Julia] Lezhneva soprano, [Franco] Fagioli countertenor, [Diego] Fasolis, I Barocchisti, Coro della Radiotelevisione svizzera
59:16
Decca 00289 483 3874
+Nisi Dominus, Nulla in mundo

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]here is much to enjoy here; the choral singing is excellent, the instrumental playing first rate, and – be you a fan of the two super-star singers or not – amazing singing. There is a problem, though; ‘Two soloists in Vivaldi’s Gloria?’ I hear you ask… Well yes – why hire a second soprano for the duets if you have the “distinctive and almost feminine sound” of Franco Fagioli in the room? It seems to me a cruel irony that these words were chosen from the reams of critical acclaim the man has had to tag on the back of a CD of music that was written for a woman. In these days of rows over non-Latino singers taking the lead role in West Side Story and cultural misappropriation when an American high school girl wears a Chinese dress to her prom, countertenors need to watch their step. His performance of Nisi Dominus is very convincing though, even if his box of tricks does not include a convincing trill. Julia Lezhneva’s contributions are almost flawless as usual, even taking time to subtly colour repeats of phrases (without OTT ornamentation or ostentation!) and the final Alleluia of her motet is the perfect close to a fine CD, even if there was plenty room for another contribution from the choir.

Brian Clark

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Tags Baroque, Choral music