Tag: Chamber music

Italico Splendore
63:26
Tactus TC 632203

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These trio sonatas by Vitali are essentially sonatas da chiesa, intended for use in the church and the home, which explains the fact that the occasionally unfettered creativity of late-17th-century violin music is slightly muted here. Employed at the Este Court in Modena, Vitali would have been privileged to have been surrounded by first-class music-making as well as an inexhaustible archive of written music, and these pieces have a wonderfully cosmopolitan quality, as well as a striking sense of assurance. Very well regarded during his own lifetime, Vitali may now not be considered as belonging in the top ranks of Italian Baroque composers, but the present CD presenting all twelve of his opus 2 Sonatas of 1682 suggests a gifted and original musical imagination at work. Within the conventions of the Sonata da Chiesa, Vitali manages to produce melodies of melting beauty such as the Adagio of the fourth sonata. In addition to the two excellent Baroque violinists Claudio Andriani and Micol Vitali (a descendant?) playing wonderfully sonorous original Italian Baroque instruments, Italico Splendore field a pleasingly varied continuo team of cello, violone, archlute/theorbo/Baroque guitar and organ/harpsichord.

D. James Ross

Andreas Böhlen, Michael Hell, Daniel Rosin, Pietro Prosser
73:20
AEOLUS AE-10306

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Notwithstanding his embarrassment of Christian names (including all three wise men!), Giuseppe Francesco Gaspare Melchiorre Baldassare Sammartini is the less celebrated of the two Sammartini brothers – Giovanni Battista being the more familiar. Indeed, as David Lasocki’s excellently comprehensive programme note points out, ‘our’ Sammartini’s works are nowadays practically unperformed apart from a concerto for descant recorder and strings. His bold assertion that nothing else by Sammartini or, indeed, by his contemporaries prepares us for these sonatas, which he describes as ‘staggeringly original’, is powerfully born out by these lovely performances. Sammartini has the gift, limited to very few of his fellow composers such as Purcell, Telemann and Handel, of finding his own very individual melodic and harmonic path through the generally very conventional landscape of Baroque music. It is safe to say in, for example, the Andante of the F major Sinfonia (Track 9) Sammartini simply never goes in the direction you would predict, finding some novel route rather than a cliché. The son of a professional French oboist Alexis Saint-Martin, Giuseppe and his brother Giovanni toured Italy taking up a succession of posts mainly in opera orchestras before Giuseppe progressed to the musical hot-spot of London, where he carved out a career before ending his days in royal employment. As an oboist, he would have been expected to ‘double’ on recorder and flute as required, but the superb understanding of the treble recorder apparent in these sonatas (in effect these pieces are all sonatas, for all some are called concertos and others sinfonias) suggests that he played the instrument as a solo virtuoso and probably also taught it. The performances here are stunning, technically utterly assured, musically sympathetic and the players are clearly aware of the originality of the material they are presenting. Andreas Böhlen’s exquisite playing on three recorders (copies of Steenbergen, Jacob Denner and Stanesby junior originals) is utterly persuasive and is very sympathetically and imaginatively supported by model continuo team of harpsichord, cello and lute. This window on Sammartini’s recorder works, which all survive in a single manuscript in the Biblioteca Palatina in Parma, partly explains the current undeserved obscurity of this music – much of the chamber music of the early Baroque period circulated in manuscript form and amazingly has either remained unpublished until our own times, or are still unpublished. The numbering of the Parma pieces recorded here suggests plenty of scope for at least a volume 2 of these delightful sonatas – we look forward to this with eager anticipation.

D. James Ross

Ensemble Danguy, Tobie Miller
51:15
Ricercar RIC398

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I have to say when I saw the cover of this CD my heart sank – Les Saisons Amusantes: Nicolas Chédeville (after Antonio Vivaldi). Over the years I have reviewed so many CDs where people felt impelled to ‘muck about’ with Vivaldi’s Four Seasons with more or less disastrous results. However, a closer examination revealed that tampering with Vivaldi was not just a phenomenon of our times – this CD presents a version by Nicolas Chédeville printed in 1739 and arranged in the French taste of the period for ‘les musettes et les vielles avec accompagnement de violon, fluste et Basse continue’! Closer inspection reveals that Mons. Chédeville manages to amass six ‘seasons’, only the first of which (‘Spring’) is a direct transcription of Vivaldi. The other pieces draw freely from other concertos in the Cimento dell’armonia e dell’inventione – ‘Summer’ and ‘Winter’ use none of the music from the equivalent pieces by Vivaldi, while ‘Autumn’ combines the outer movements of the original with the slow movement from Vivaldi’s ‘Winter’. The two additional pieces (La Moisson and Les Plaisirs de la Saint-Martin) are complete confections from the rest of the Cimento. This would appear already to merit the term ‘mucking about’, albeit 18th-century ‘mucking about’. The ensemble has also been selective in their instrumentation accompanying the solo hurdy-gurdy with two violins, cello, bassoon, theorbo/guitar and harpsichord – so no musettes and no recorder as requested by Chédeville. I think the addition of a musette or two might have been intriguing. If you accept the arrangements at face value along with the instrumentation decisions, the performances have a certain charm, and certainly provide a window on the rather bizarre musical world of early 18th-century France, with its wannabe rustic aristocrats milking imaginary cows and expressing themselves on hurdy-gurdies. So this is certainly not just your standard CD devoted to ‘mucking about’ with Vivaldi, but – notwithstanding the virtuosity – I found the unvarying textures, which might have been helped with the participation of recorder and musettes, a little ennui-making. Quelle domage!

D. James Ross

Estro Cromatico, Marco Scorticati
57:38
Arcana A112

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Corelli at his most inventive and lyrical, beautiful recorder playing sympathetically supported by a classy continuo team – I need hardly say any more! Well, I should probably address the issue that Corelli probably wrote no original music for recorders, and that these Sonatas and Concerti ‘fitted for the flutes’ were arrangements published in London in 1702, 1707 (the Sonatas) and 1725 (the Concerti) to satisfy the enormous demand for music for the newly fashionable recorder. The Sonatas are arranged from Corelli’s op 5 Violin Sonatas, and while they sound technically very demanding, they are played here with enormous assurance. The Concerti, on the other hand, are arrangements of Corelli’s famous op 6 Concerti Grossi, – ironically in their first edition of 1720 inexplicably missing out one or two of the more famous movements, such as the famous Christmas music! These were restored in the 1725 edition performed here, allowing the CD to end with this charming seasonal music which sounds like it was written with recorders in mind! Indeed all of these concerto arrangements sound utterly convincing on two recorders and continuo, and Estro Cromatico perform them with considerable flair, tastefully decorating as appropriate. It is easy to hear the influence of these transcriptions on the resident London composers such as Paisible, Loeillet and Sammartini, all of whom produced substantial amounts of music for recorders and some of whom may even have been involved in the Corelli arrangements. The indefatigable John Walsh, Handel’s chief publisher, was the driving force behind the publication of these arrangements, which proved very popular at the time, and provide recorder players nowadays with legitimate access to the music of Corelli.

D. James Ross

Plamena Nikitossova violin,  Julian Behr theorbo,  Matthias Müller violone,  Jörg-Andreas Botticher harpsichord/organ
70:02
Claves 50-1727

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This exploration of the fantastical world of 17th-century virtuosic solo violin music adds a number of names to the increasingly familiar Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber and Georg Muffat. Heinrich Lizkau, Phillip Friedrich Böddecker, Heinrich Döbel, Johann Jacob Walter and Johann Caspar Kerll can all hold their heads up in this impressive company, producing wildly imaginative music for solo violin, which jumping a generation or two seems to have more in common with the technical fireworks and sheer fantasy of the likes of Paganini. As a Biber fan of long standing, it is exciting to have confirmed that he was by no means working in isolation, and we can almost hear these composers vying with one another in the sheer quirky creativity of their compositions. Plamena Nikitossova plays with stunning virtuosity and enormous flair,  as well as a saucy wit where appropriate, and the distinctive playing position she adopts following the advice of Georg Falck’s 1688 treatise Idea boni cantoris adds a certain authenticity to her approach. Her Jakobus Stainer violin of 1659 has a rich and flamboyant tone, while her continuo team employing a modern copy of a Stradivarius guitar (!), theorbo, violone, a clavimusicum omnitonum, and the 1642 organ of the Franziskanerkirche in Vienna are sympathetically supportive.

D. James Ross

Ensemble BariAntiquA
64:17
MV Cremona MVC 017/44

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Migali’s Sonatas for ‘doi violine, e violone, ò arcileuto, col basso per l’organo’ printed in Rome in 1694 are preserved in the archives of his home town Lecce in southern Italy. A professional musician, Migali’s op 1 sonatas – his only surviving printed work – appeared when he was around 60 (he lived into his 80s) so probably reflect the work of the mature composer, and indeed sound very confident in their style. This has been brought under the broad umbrella of the ‘Roman school’, later exemplified by Corelli, and indeed Migali may have been briefly resident in Rome around the time of the publication. These works have the same easy melodic flow and constant lyricism of Corelli and in these beautifully idiomatic performances their full charm is revealed. The ensemble go for the arcileuto option rather than the violone, alternating and augmenting it with a theorbo along with the stipulated organ. The light accompaniment is beautifully responsive and subtle, allowing the two solo violin parts, tastefully and expertly played by Dario Palmisano and Michele Saracino, to soar freely as intended by the composer. Intriguingly, in addition to stipulating so precisely his ideal instrumentation, Migali also seems to have added bowing marks to his scores – an unusual early example of this sort of intervention, but unfortunately not entirely clear in meaning.

D. James Ross

Music by Califano, Fasch, Heinichen, Lotti, Quantz, Telemann and Vivaldi
Zefiro, Alfredo Bernardini
77:52
Arcana A438

A few years ago I reviewed an intriguing recording of the Corelli op. 6 Concerti Grossi with added parts for wind instruments ‘as they might have been performed at the 18th-century Court of Dresden’, and this present CD further explores the rich context of the ‘Churfürstliche Sächsische Cammer-Musique’ in a series of chamber works for two oboes, bassoon and continuo. The music played in Dresden in the first half of the 18th century did much to shape the playing techniques and repertoire for these recently invented wind-instruments. Heinichen, Quantz and Arcangelo Califano all worked at the Saxon Court at some point, while Vivaldi and Lotti encountered musicians on tour from Dresden and were persuaded to compose for them. Telemann’s music, ubiquitous throughout the German lands, is extensively recorded in the Dresden Court archives. These are charming and very accessible pieces, played with complete technical assurance and considerable musicality by Zefiro, providing a window on an otherwise under-explored area of chamber music, a period of particular magnificence at the Court of Dresden, and a crucial stage in the development of the oboe and bassoon.

D. James Ross