Tag: Chamber music

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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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Beyond Beethoven

CD cover Anneke Scott Stephen Devine Beyond Beethoven

Anneke Scott horn, Steven Devine 
77:51
resonus RES10267

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This programme of music for horn and fortepiano represents a cross-section of the music for this combination written in the wake of Beethoven’s op 17 Sonata, premiered in 1800 by the composer and horn virtuoso, Giovanni Punto, and considered the first ever composed for these instruments. The programme, and Anneke Scott’s erudite programme notes, draw fascinating connections between this first horn sonata and the repertoire on the CD. While listeners may well have heard of Ferdinand Ries, represented here by an impressive Grande Sonate, the other three composers – Friedrich Eugen Thürner, Friedrich Starke and Hendrik Coenraad Steup – will be unfamiliar to most. Thürner moved in elevated musical circles, working with the likes of Louis Spohr and his star clarinettist, Simon Hermstedt. Sadly a number of professional setbacks and deteriorating mental health led to his early death in an asylum in 1827. Horn player and composer Friedrich Starke was a close friend of Beethoven’s, also playing the sonata with him, and he draws heavily on the world of the hunting horn calls for his broodingly romantic Adagio and Rondo. Also a pianist, Starke published a method for the “Viennese Piano” in which he explores the various timbres possible using the pedal effects available. Steven Devine’s Fritz Viennese fortepiano of 1815 boasts four pedals and a bassoon knee lever. Finally, Hendrik Coenraad Steup’s links to the Beethoven Sonata are more overt if less direct, in that a note from the composer tells us that the opening six bars recall those of the earlier work. As one of the foremost proponents of period horn today, Anneke Scott provides confident, technically assured and historically informed accounts of this engaging chamber music, and is ably supported by Steven Devine on fortepiano. There is an innate musicality to this pairing, as well as a boldness and flamboyance, which must have been a feature of the original performances of this early repertoire for horn and piano.

D. James Ross

Download the booklet and listen to samples HERE.

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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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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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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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Schubert: Piano Trio No. 2, Arpeggione Sonata

CD cover Schubert Piano Trio no 2 Arpeggione sonata Hobarth Rudin Häkkinen

Erich Höbarth violin, Alexander Rudin arpeggione/cello and Aapo Häkkinen Graf fortepiano
79:55
Naxos 8.573884

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Arguably the main talking point here is Schubert’s Arpeggione Sonata in A minor, D 821 played on the instrument for which it was written in 1824. The arpeggione, a kind of bowed guitar with frets and six strings, had been invented only around a year earlier by one of the principal Viennese luthiers, Johann Georg Stauffer. It would enjoy a brief existence, its only noted performer being Vincenz Schuster, a guitarist who was a regular performer at the domestic concerts given by Schubert and his friends. Today the work is usually played on the cello, or, less frequently the viola, but given the greater compass of the arpeggione, it requires transposition and has been adapted for all manner of instruments, not to mention turned into a concerto. Schubert scholars tend to be rather snooty about it, but it is an affable, engaging and substantial piece in three movements, a playful Allegro moderato with a development section that builds a fair degree of tension, a song-like Adagio with some typically felicitous modulations and a good-humoured final Allegretto that sets out as an animated dialogue between the two instruments.

The performance is excellent. The arpeggione sounds (at least here) a little like a cross between a cello and a viol, but the upper register has a distinctive wiry sonority. It blends well with the fortepiano, a Viennese instrument built by Conrad Graf in 1827, the year of the E flat Piano Trio, and just a year before Schubert’s death. It would have been good to have been given more detail on it, for it is an instrument of exceptional tonal beauty, with a silvery top register capable of the most delicate scalic passagework and arpeggiations, but also a strong, firmly rounded bass, as the Finnish harpsichordist and fortepianist Aapo Häkkinen demonstrates throughout both works.

The Piano Trio No 2 in E flat, D 929, is of course one of the great products of Schubert’s last year, a massive four-movement work rich in all that is valued in the composer. The strong opening announcement of the Allegro sets out the stall with striking effect. This, Schubert seems to be saying, is going to be something impressive and of expansive breadth. Yet he is quickly into more lyrical territory with the cello’s statement and the movement will ebb and flow between moments of dramatic tension and flowing lyricism, all splendidly captured here by Erich Höbarth, Alexander Rudin and Häkkinen. Listen, for example, to the beguiling lyrical warmth of the secondary idea. A similarly treasurable moment comes at the same point in the succeeding Andante con moto, and again shortly afterwards with the keyboard’s arpeggiations, a passage marked con Pedale, appassionato, where Häkkinen conjures pure magic from the Graf. But throughout these are performances of the highest calibre, performances that given the bargain Naxos price tag should be snapped up without delay.

Brian Robins

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Boccherini: Complete Flute Quintets

CD cover of Boccherini Flute Quintets

Rafael Ruibérriz de Torres, Francisco de Goya String Quartet
158:29 (3 CDs)
Brilliant Classics 96074

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Luigi Boccherini composed three sets of six flute quintets – namely his opera 17, 19 and 55 – the two earliest sets in 1773 and 1774, just after his appointment as chamber musician to Prince Luis Antonio de Bourbón in Spain. The two early sets, the product of a thirty-year-old composer, have a delightful freshness and individuality to them, with the flute playing the ensemble role of a primus inter pares rather than dominating the texture with virtuosity. The nevertheless demanding flute writing suggests the presence in the royal circle of a player of considerable technical and musical ability, but sadly he or she has not as yet been identified. Boccherini’s reputation (in my opinion undeserved) as a composer of slight and often superficial music is belied but this constantly imaginative and beautifully crafted music, which is played with enormous flair on period instruments by flautist Rafael Ruibérriz de Torres with the  Francisco de Goya String Quartet. There is a wonderful sense of ensemble, as well as a witty and fruitful interaction among the players, bringing out the full charm and elegance of Boccherini’s music. Twenty-five years later, inspired by the flautist Gaspar Barli Boccherini returned to the flute quartet, composing his opus 55 set in 1797. What a lot has changed since the earlier sets! Boccherini has made the subtle but significant stylistic move from galant to classical, while he has fully embraced his adopted Spanish heritage, including no fewer than three fandangos in the set, as well as adopting a notably folk-related idiom elsewhere. He is also less coy about letting individual instruments, most notably the flute and his own cello, step out of the more homogenous textures into the spotlight. The result is music that sounds much more profound and rhetorically powerful, and the performers rise magnificently to the challenge with highly eloquent performances. Recorded in two dramatically contrasting venues (namely a church and a recording studio), the Brilliant engineers do a very fine job in creating the same lively and sympathetic acoustic for all three CDs, and the tone of the period strings and Signor de Torres’ Wenner copy of an 18th-century Grenser flute is captured extremely vividly. This is a delightful set of recordings, adding valuably to our impressions of Boccherini as a composer of imagination and substance.

D. James Ross

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Forqueray Unchained

CD cover of Forqueray Unchained Lislevand

André Lislevand, Jadran Duncumb, Paola Erdas, feat. Rolf Lislevand
61:49
Arcana A486

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I’ve been hoping for some Forqueray (who was born in 1671) in this anniversary year and here we have three artist-compiled suites in which his music is predominant, but complemented by selections from the work of Marin Marais, Robert de Visée, and Louis Couperin. The gamba is mostly accompanied by theorbo, though occasionally (and unnecessarily) also by harpsichord. I did, however, enjoy the keyboard’s rich solo – Couperin’s Passacaille.

Forqueray’s demands on his interpreters are considerable, but André Lislevand is absolutely on top of his game and not afraid to explore the extremes of his instrument’s aesthetic world though without ever losing touch with le bon goût. From time to time he is perhaps a little too gentle compared with the more incisive theorbo, though it might be, of course, that the latter needed to curb his enthusiasm in places. But theirs is an audibly happy collaboration and the actual programme is excellently conceived.

The booklet (in English, French, and Italian) contains the usual biographies and three short essays which, as seems to be the current fashion, give us the music’s context but say little specific about its content, though this would surely be welcomed by anyone new to the repertoire.

David Hansell

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Bach: Concerto à Cembali concertati vol. 4

CD cover Bach Concerto à Cembali concertati vol. 4

Concertos for 3 & 4 harpsichords
Aapo Häkkinen, Miklós Spányi, Cristiano Holtz, Anna-Maaria Oramo, Helsinki Baroque Orchestra
77:45
Aeolus AE-10107
+Müthel: Duetto in E-flat major

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This recording brings the set of four CDs of Helsinki Baroque Orchestra’s recording of Bach’s Concerti à Cembali concertati, with Aapo Häkkinen as the leading harpsichordist, to a conclusion. The first volume was released in 2012.

The playing is light and bright, and with one-to-a-part strings, the harpsichords – especially in BWV 1065 – are in no danger of being smothered. As in the previous recordings, the Helsinki Baroque Orchestra plays on an interesting array of instruments with violins by Stainer and Klotz, a viola by Leclerc c. 1770 and a ‘cello from Rome c. 1700. The odd one out is a Bohemian double bass dated 1840, and it sounds like it: much too boomy in some places. Clearly, they do not always play with a 16’ – there is a delightfully transparent Youtube video of their performance in Japan of Brandenburg V which not only eschews a 16’ violone but has only two other upper strings alongside the concertante violin! So why use a double bass when a slighter-toned violone would have matched the other strings far better?

The ‘filler’ in this volume – it has included pieces for single harpsichord in the earlier volumes like the Italian concerto – is a quite different piece: Johann Gottfried Müthel (1728-1788)’s Duetto in E-flat major of 1771 is in three movements played here on two closely-recorded clavichords from the very end of the 18th century, reminding us of the continuing popularity of the clavichord as a boudoir instrument, which is just what is right for this piece.

I have quite a few recordings of the complete set of harpsichord concerti: Ton Koopman with the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra from the early 1990s, Trevor Pinnock with The English Concert, Lars Ulrich Mortensen with Concerto Copenhagen, and there is Pieter-Jan Belder with the Amphion Consort for Brilliant Classics and Davitt Morony with colleagues on historic instruments – all of which have strong claims as a complete set.

Only the more recent like Concerto Copenhagen, the Amphion Consort and the emerging (but not yet complete) series with Francesco Corti and Il Pomo d’Oro use (rightly to my mind) single strings, so this recording may be a good choice.

David Stancliffe