Tag: Chamber music

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Recording

Telemann: Complete violin concertos vol. 9

CD cover Telemann Complete violin concertos vol 9 Huber van Heerden L'Orfeo

Julia Huber, Martin Jopp, Lucas Schurig-Breuß, L’Orfeo Barockorchester, directed by Carin van Heerden
61:17
cpo 555 699-2

This recording represents the conclusion of a 22-year project to bring to the fore the varied works for one, two, three and four violins (with and without bass), including nine suites with solo violin, and TWV55:g8 with two.

Originally under the directorship and lead violin Libby Wallfisch (co-founder of the orchestra), the previous eight volumes display such admirable qualities right from the outset back in 2004.

Now it is time for the former “understudies” Julia Huber and Martin Jopp to step up and shine in these works coming from the Eisenach period 1708-12. One can hear the agile binary effect for two violins right from the fanfare-like opening intrada of the D-major concerto (a premiere). It is easy to imagine Telemann’s old musical sparring partner, the dance-master, composer Pantaleon Hebenstreit (1668-1750, inventor of a kind of dulcimer) on the instrument alongside him as they bounce off each other in vivid, engaged interplay. Julia’s 1680 Mantuan school violin has an incisive tone which often fizzes through the passages, or casts a wistful spell of melancholy in the slower movements, like both the opening and third movements of the G minor double violin concerto (quite a rare piece, for which Prima la musica! receives warm thanks for supplying the parts material here.)

In the penultimate work, the superbly contoured G major concerto, Julia Huber’s solo playing is most articulate. In the final Presto, she captures the dynamic spirit with a splendid little cadenza.

Closing the CD, the exquisite ripieno concerto in E minor, whose first movement was expanded in Dresden to make a kind of sinfonia to a cantata. Some wonderful writing here catches the ear, not least the tender Cantabile second movement, then the final, vigorous gigue–styled Presto.

Amongst these fine early examples of Telemann’s violin concertos, we have yet another take on the viola concerto, reputedly one of the earliest for this instrument.

This series has been like the vibrant and florid cover photography, a bright, vivid transit through some very noteworthy pieces, some of Telemann’s most engaging and entertaining works for violin(s).

David Bellinger

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Book

Beate Sorg: Christoph Graupner

Book cover Beate Sorg Christoph Graupner Biographie eines Hofkapellmeisters

Biographie eines Hofkapellmeisters
Studien und Materialien zur Musikwissenschaft Band 137
265pp. €39
ISBN 978-3-487-17157-9 (Print) 17158-6 (ePDF)
Georg Olms Verlag

This excellent volume should be required reading for anyone interested in music in 18th-century Germany. Beate Sort has long been recognised as a specialist on Graupner’s music, and this beautifully illustrated, detail-rich study reveals just how deep her knowledge goes.

Using three contemporary bibliographical sources – and quoting them throughout the chronological narrative – she provides a comprehensive assessment of the composer’s life, and shines a light on the places where he studied and worked, and the people with whom he mixed in each of them. The appendix includes a list of those people, nine pages of bibliography, a very useful list of abbreviations along with explanations of 18th-century weights and measures from Hessen-Darmstadt (where Graupner spent the vast majority of his adult life as Hofkapellmeister), and valuable information on older forms of language used in the original documents.

All in all, this book is packed with information. It is unlikely that you would want to read it in one sitting. Still, the fact that Sorg has broken it into chapters broadly divided by decades and concentrates on different musical genres at various points makes it an extraordinarily handy resource.

Congratulations on an excellent piece of work!

Brian Clark

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Sheet music

Restoration Theatre Airs

Cover of MB110 Restoration theatre airs

Edited by Peter Holman & Andrew Woolley
Musica Britannica MB110
ISBN: 9780852499757 ISMN: 9790220229183
lix + 156pp, £135.00
Stainer & Bell

This important volume includes music by 14 composers. The first set of airs includes music for “The Tempest” by Matthew Locke and Robert Smith, but the remaining 12 suites are single-composer examples. The others are William Turner, Louis Grabu, Gottfried Finger, Francis Forcer, William Croft, John Eccles, Jeremiah Clarke, James Paisible, William Corbett, John Barrett, possibly Pierre Gillier, and the ever-popular Anonymous. In other words, it’s a veritable who’s who? of Purcellian England.

The music itself is mostly in four parts. Exceptions are Turner’s music for “Pastor Fido, or The Faithful Shepherd” in three parts, and Grabu’s for “Valentinian” in five. Finger added a woodwind solo to the sixth movement of his music for “The Mourning Bride”. The editors have composed a viola part for Forcer’s music in “The Innocent Mistress”. The suites consist of an overture and a sequence of binary dances or airs, the vast majority in what you might call “standard keys”; the four movements in the appendices to the Finger suite are in F minor (only the bass line of the fourth survives), which is the home key of Clarke’s “All for the Better…”

A description of the sources fills more than ten pages. The critical notes, which together with the extensive introduction, are a tribute to the editors, occupy the next 13 pages. I was unable to find an explanation of why they opted to add a viola part to the Forcer suite, but not the Turner. The added trumpet part in Barrett’s “The Albion Queens” is idiomatic and utterly convincing. Another fine volume in this series of international importance.

Brian Clark

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Recording

Mademoiselle Hilaire

CD cover Mademoiselle Hilaire

Virginie Thomas
79:00
encelade ECL2502

Virginie Thomas has established a reputation as something of a specialist nymph (!), and with good reason. Here she effortlessly inhabits the persona and repertoire of Mademoiselle Hilaire Dupuis, sister-in-law of Michel Lambert and a key member of Lully’s troupe. He married her niece, and one can only speculate as to the nature of daily life and conversation in the house they all shared!

The programme offers a musical biography of the singer and involves both other singers and an instrumental ensemble (five-part strings and a continuo team). Being fussy, I have to observe that some numbers really are orchestral rather than chamber in their conception, but perhaps this is how the music was sometimes heard in the household referred to above.

No individual items stand out: the strength here is the programme as a whole, and it is well supported by the booklet, which gives contexts and texts/translations. If this is the kind of themed project you want to do, do it like this.

David Hansell

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Recording

Gelosia!

CD cover Jaroussky Gelosia

Philippe Jaroussky countertenor, Artaserse
70:58
Erato 5054197998713

The Italian secular chamber cantata was, at its best, arguably the most sophisticated musical form of the Baroque era. Far from being some kind of miniature opera – as performers at times wrongly tend to assume in their approach to cantatas – they explore a world of refined emotional response that does not exclude depth or passion. The audience for such pieces invariably consisted of cognoscenti who expected to hear both poetry and music of the highest quality. It’s a genre that, in many ways, suits the voice and style of French counter-tenor Philippe Jaroussky admirably. The ease of his vocal production is coupled with an ability to shape long cantabile phrases with elegance and articulate passaggi with admirable clarity. The singer’s long experience with this repertoire allows him to bring to it the understanding that added ornamentation requires a greater degree of subtlety than might be applied to an operatic aria. Above all, there is Jaroussky’s unique vocal quality – sometimes wrongly described as androgynous – that takes the listener to a place of security, a place where the singer convinces his audience that he could not make an ugly sound even if he tried to. If that suggests a near-perfect performer, there have long been caveats, too. Jaroussky’s diction in a repertoire that demands textural clarity has often been found wanting, while his lack of a trill is perhaps the greatest single deficit in his technique.

Jaroussky’s choice of cantatas on the theme of jealousy is a particularly felicitous one, including as it does favourites by Vivaldi and Handel, a superb example by Alessandro Scarlatti and, intriguingly, settings of the same Metastasio text (‘La Gelosia’) by Nicola Porpora and Baldassari Galuppi, composed in 1746 and 1782 respectively. The jealousy that forms the overall topic is often of a somewhat studied, pastoral turn, apparent from the names of the cause of jealousy: Filli (Scarlatti), Dorilla (Vivaldi), Nice and Thyrsis (Porpora and Galuppi), Chloris (Handel). This is not the grand, all-consuming jealousy of a Medea, but that of a shepherd who believes his shepherdess has betrayed him. After the cantata has ended, they will make up again, but for its duration, that pain will be keenly enough felt. Perhaps the Scarlatti is the one work here that does not follow such a format. Dating from 1716, it is cast in the form of an ombre scene, its two long passages of accompagnati evoking both literal and metaphorical dark caverns, shadows and fearsome images. The first of the two arias expands this nightmarish scenario, while the final number speaks of how the singer’s betrayed soul will haunt the lover who betrayed him. And here Jaroussky’s pronounced stress on the repeated word, ‘Crudel!’ is highly effective.

The Metastasio text is a different take on the topic of jealousy. Here, in an opening accompagnato – where Porpora demonstrates his acknowledged skill with this type of recitative – the lover pleads forgiveness for falsely accusing his lover Nice of being unfaithful. Porpora follows this with a fully developed da capo aria, a gracious andante in which the lover underlines his newfound trust in Nice. It leans towards the galant style and is twice the length of Galuppi’s equivalent aria. The latter, with its touches of the sentimental style, is texturally more nuanced, and if we might be surprised that Galuppi still chooses to set the by-now old-fashioned poetry of Metastasio, it serves as a pertinent reminder of the esteem in which the poet was held until beyond the end of the 18th century. The second accompagnato brings a dramatic twist. The lover now recalls that Nice is also loved by Thrysis and that she has bestowed on him secretive smiles that were once his alone to enjoy. The concluding aria is a somewhat enigmatic metaphor offering both composers the opportunity for coloratura writing, here executed with practised ease by Jaroussky.

He is supported throughout by his own chamber ensemble Artaserse, here comprising flute (in Handel’s ‘Mi palpita il cor’), two violins, cello, lute (a superfluous addition) and harpsichord, which plays well but is not above some over-fussy decoration. But overall this is a fascinating programme felicitously presented by one of today’s finest artists.

Brian Robins

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Recording

Godecharle: Sei Quartetti op. IV

CD cover Godecharle Sei Quartetti op. IV

Société Lunaire
73:26
Ramée RAM2207

The celebrated traveller and commentator on music Charles Burney heard a performance of Godecharle’s music for harp in Brussels in 1772, and although he identified him as German, in fact, we can add him to our list of famous Belgians as Eugéne-Charles-Jean Godecharle was a local boy born in that city in 1742. Such was the turbulent state of Europe during his lifetime that he was born in the Austrian Netherlands and died in the French First Republic, all without leaving Brussels! Burney heard a ‘young lady play extremely well on the harp with pedals’, an invention permitting more chromatic demands to be placed on the instrument, and indeed Godecharle’s six quartets are each in a different key. While the epicentre of harp playing and composition inevitably became Paris, with Queen Marie-Antoinette becoming proficient on the instrument, and the link with ‘young ladies’ also becoming almost ubiquitous, it was the Brussels maker Simon Hochbrucker who ensured the success of the pedal harp, and his two sons, both harp virtuosi, who ensured its spread throughout Europe. Perhaps it was for one of these players that Godecharle wrote his three Sonatas for harp with violin accompaniment and the present six Quartets. Godecharle’s music is relatively undemanding on players and listeners, but not without its charms, and the Société Lunaire and their harpist Maximilian Ehrhardt wisely let it speak for itself in these delightful recordings.

D. James Ross

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Recording

Ballade pour un violoncelle piccolo

CD cover Ballade pour un violoncelle piccolo

Hager Hanana
53:07
Seulétoile SE 06
Music by Weiss, Abel, Bach, Biber

A fine account of the sixth of Bach’s Suites for solo cello BWV 1012 on the violoncello piccolo is at the heart of this programme of music for this diminutive cello. When they first appeared, cellos existed in various sizes, and a couple such as the piccolo survived into the Baroque period, and Hager Hanana’s choice of repertoire hints at what they might have been playing. While this Bach Suite out of all the six he wrote seems to lie best for cello piccolo and was probably composed with the instrument in mind, Hanana fills out her programme with two pieces for viola da gamba by Carl Abel and music originally composed for lute by Leopold Weiss. She concludes her programme with a fine account of the Passagaglia, ‘The guardian angel’ from Biber’s Rosary Sonatas, originally for solo violin. It has to be said that all of this music works very well on Hanana’s chosen instrument, and, in the general absence of solo repertoire specifically for cello piccolo, these pieces seem like a valid option. Hanana plays her anonymous 18th-century cello piccolo with commitment, skill and musicality, and these performances are convincing and enjoyable.

D. James Ross

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Recording

Le cabinet de curiosités

CD cover Le cabinet de curiosités

Trésors oubliés du clavecin des Lumières
Anastasie Jeanne harpsichord, Emilie Clément Planche violin, Julianna David cello
65:00
L’Encelade ECL 2403

Playing a 2023 harpsichord by Marc Ducornet, inspired by the instruments of the Parisian maker Jean-Henri Hemsch, Anastasie Jeanne focuses her attention on the music of Jean-Jacques Beauvarlet-Charpentier and Simon Simon, two unfamiliar composers born in the same year and whose respective op 1s she mines to great effect. Beauvarlet-Charpentier’s Premier Livre de Pièces pour Clavecin, essentially a collection of single-movement character pieces, and Simon’s Pièces de Clavecin Dans tous les Genres avec et sans Accompagnement de Violon, a set of suites for solo harpsichord as well as Suite Concertos with violin and cello “offer us a glimpse of all the brilliance, elegance and virtuosity of the harpsichord repertoire at Louis XV’s court”, as the CD note concisely puts it. The concept of the Cabinet of Curiosities is also not misplaced, as these are eccentric pieces by clearly eccentric composers. For the last ten years of his life, Beauvarlat-Charpentier was organist at Notre Dame de Paris and by this time was celebrated as an organist and composer. Simon, by contrast, is remembered largely as the teacher of the young members of the royal family under Louis XV, remaining at Versailles during the reign of Louis XVI, and despite his royal associations surviving the French Revolution. Both men lived in colourful times during something of a golden age for the harpsichord, before it was remorselessly replaced by the early piano. Anastasie Jeanne’s performances on her pleasantly-toned harpsichord are elegant and expressive, and powerfully emphatic when appropriate, and she is ably and sympathetically supported in the Simon Suite Concerto by violinist Emilie Clément-Planche and cellist Julianna David.

D. James Ross

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Recording

Newe Vialles: Old Viols

CD cover Newe Vialles Old Viols

Henrik Persson, Caroline Ritchie, Lynda Sayce, James Akers
65:26
Barn Cottage Records BCR 027

The Newe Vialles of the title is the name taken by this excellent group of musicians: the “Old Viols” are the bass viols by John Pitts (1675) and Edward Lewis (1703) respectively, which come together on this CD in the capable hands of Henrik Persson and Caroline Ritchie. The latter’s engaging programme note makes it clear that the players set out by imagining what the two owners of these venerable instruments might have played if they had encountered one another. The result is a beautifully varied programme of music by Benjamin Hely, Christopher Simpson, John Jenkins and William Young with interludes for guitar and theorbo/lute by Nicola Matteis and Daniel Norcombe and from the Balcarres Lute Book. As in Henrik Persson’s CD of solo bass viol music, which he plays on the Edward Lewis viol, the stars of this recording are the “Old Viols” whose sonorous tone and immediacy of articulation belie their extreme old age. Both instruments have been extensively restored, but we can be sure that it is their richness of tone which, in part, has ensured their survival to the present day. It is thrilling to hear these remarkable musical survivors in the hands of expert players such as Persson and Ritchie, while the selection of repertoire, which goes far beyond the obvious, provides a compelling picture of music-making in the 17th and early 18th centuries. The choice of Baroque guitar and theorbo/lute for the continuo role, on the basis that these are instruments likely to be found in most households at the time, provides a satisfying consort sound that complements the viols to perfection.

D. James Ross

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Recording

The Secrets of Andalusia

CD cover The secrets of Andalusia Vox Musicae London

Lux Musicae London with Victoria Couper, Konstantinos Glynos and Ignacio Lusardi Monteverde
71:14
First Hand Records FHR157

This attractive mixture of traditional Andalusian and early music from Spain and elsewhere works very well as a programme. Oud, kanun and flamenco guitar rub shoulders with recorders, Baroque harp and guitar, lute, viola da gamba and soprano and tenor voices in a creative interface in which each of these two styles cross paths and influence one another. As with recordings by Jordi Savall and others who endeavour to introduce the spice of their traditional roots into performances of early music, there are revelations but also some slight stretching of the historically informed rules – if you set out to trace the roots of flamenco in early music, you will generally find them! However, there remains a gulf between the flamenco guitars, oud and kanun, generally modern instruments, and the ‘early’ instruments, copies of historical examples, while the kanun and oud are tuned to one scale and the modern guitar and early instruments to another, while of course as part of a living tradition the music for flamenco guitar engages with a thoroughly modern harmonic world. This gap even extends to the singers – soprano Victoria Couper using a thrilling flamenco-type voice production and Roberta Diamond and Daniel Thomson generally using a more orthodox style of singing, although these versatile singers are also able to move in a more traditional direction when necessary. If you accept this CD as a dynamic amalgam of traditional and historically informed approaches, it makes for a joyful listen, and in their work with their traditional music guests, Lux Musicae London have undoubtedly found sympathetic echoes in the early material they perform.

D. James Ross