Tag: Chamber music

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Lucrezia: Portraits of a Woman

CD cover Lucrezia Les Paladins

Sandrine Piau, Amel Brahim-Djelloul, Karine Deshayes, Lucile Richardot SSSmS, Les Paladins, Jérôme Correas
64:00
Aparté AP359

The story of the rape and subsequent suicide of the Roman noblewoman Lucretia in 509 BC has resonated down the centuries. As a political event that spelt the end of the Roman monarchy and as a personal tragedy, the sexual violence of Sextus Tarquinius, son of the king of Rome, has captured the attention of writers such as Livy, Ovid and later Shakespeare, painters like Artemisia Gentileschi, herself a victim of rape and portrayer of the scene in four separate paintings, and composers. The best-known versions in music are the early cantata by Handel, included here, and Britten’s opera The Rape of Lucretia. Surprisingly we are told by Jérôme Correas in his note that the Baroque era yielded only three further versions of the tale set to music, all of which are included on the present disc, providing a unique opportunity to compare and contrast the settings.

The earliest of the four is that by Alessandro Scarlatti, the ‘father’ of the Italian cantata, whose setting of a text by the Roman nobleman Cardinal Benedetto Pamphilj dates from 1680. An abridged version of the same libretto was employed by the Venetian Benedetto Marcello, who omitted the final aria. Handel’s version is something of a mystery, since it is not known where or when it was composed, nor has the author of the libretto been identified. It is frequently attributed to Pamphilj, though if it is his work it is a quite different text to the one set by Scarlatti and Marcello. Examination of the paper type has also led scholars to believe it was composed before Handel arrived in Rome, either in Florence or Venice. It is interestingly also the only one of the four cantatas to have a text entirely in the words of the stricken Lucrezia, the others all including narrative passages written in the third person. The final cantata by the French composer Michel Pignolet de Montéclair has an Italian text but the musical style tends to that of the ‘goûts réunis’ that sought to unite French and Italian taste. All four cantatas fundamentally employ the alternating recitative and aria structure, though within this pattern is an array of contrast. Scarlatti, for example, binds his final stretch of recitative with a touching vocal ritornello, ‘Ma che farai mia cor’, its repetitions more affecting as Lucrezia comes ever closer to death. It is here one of the highlights of the performance by the Algerian soprano Amel Brahim-Djelloul. But no one can match the sheer exuberance of the young Handel, whose structure abides by no rules in an extended setting that includes only two arias, but concludes with passages of an infinitely moving arioso, as death starts to steal in on Lucrezia and then a final, furious recitative outburst of unrestrained anger directed at the man who has defiled her.

In nearly every respect, this ought to have been an outstanding release, but sadly it is seriously flawed, not for musical reasons but because Aparté have taken the foolish step of issuing the CD without bothering to translate the texts into English. Such is the importance of the communication of words in this repertoire, both directly by the singer and to the listener that the lack of translation seriously diminishes the impact of these works to those without Italian or French.

It is a luxury to have four different singers, including three of France’s leading early music artists, although Karine Deshayes is generally associated more with bel canto. Her singing of the Handel has considerable merit, but in a work so frequently performed doesn’t quite match the finest versions. The lesser-known name, particularly outside France, is Brahim-Djelloul , whose singing of the Scaralatti veers between the sensitivity described above and some rather overwrought singing more suited to the opera house than the chamber. No reservations apply to Sandrine Piau’s exquisitely nuanced Montéclair or the Marcello of mezzo Lucile Richardot, whose powerful projection reminds us she is today one of France’s paramount actor-singers. Finally, it must be mentioned that the support by Les Paladins is exemplary; on their own account they contribute a fine performance of Marcello’s Concerto in F minor, op 1/7 and a brief but affecting sinfonia from Bernardo Pasquini’s oratorio Il martirio dei santi Vito.

No one that has a fair understanding of Italian and/or French should miss out on this fascinating collection. Those that don’t, well, you’ve been warned. Three boos to Aparté, whose slovenly presentation does poor service to the outstanding performers on the CD.

Brian Robins

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Recording

TRE

CD cover Tre Lise Vandermissen triple harp

Lise Vandersmissen triple harp
78:00
Et’cetera KTC 1826

The triple harp is something of a rare bird, as I soon discovered when attempting to expand the sketchy introduction to the instrument the Belgian performer Lise Vandersmissen provides in the note for her new CD. She tells us only that the instrument was invented in Naples at the end of the 16th century, having three rows of parallel strings. Visits to my old Grove Dictionary (5th edition, 1954) and the redoubtable Rev Galpin’s Old English Instruments of Music (1905), failed to yield further detail. In need of a sharp learning curve on the topic, Wikipedia eventually came to the rescue, explaining its invention was a further development following the introduction of the double harp as an answer to the expansion of the use of chromaticism at the end of the Renaissance. It appears that Welsh harpists working in London took up the instrument in a big way when it was introduced there in the early 17th century, the instrument becoming familiar in Britain as the Welsh harp, under which name the instrument is indeed described by Galpin.

We are not given any details of the harp played by Lise Vandersmissen, obviously a copy, but it has a rich, full sonority in the lower register and a pleasingly delicate bell-like upper range. Were it not for the resonant overtones, there are times when the instrument sounds not unlike a clavichord. There is little repertoire composed specifically for the triple harp, Vandersmissen’s programme consisting of her own transpositions of Baroque repertoire, plus a smaller group of her own compositions. From the outset she displays a mastery of the instrument, playing with an admirable fluency of technique. Rapid runs and ornaments, the latter not infrequently in addition to those included in the music, are executed without the blurring or buzzing sometimes experienced with less accomplished players. Most importantly, one senses that behind the technical expertise lies true musicality.  

The instrument is here particularly effective in pieces of an improvisatory or rhapsodic character, as in the Fantasia by Mudarra (1510-80) and Toccata by Trabaci (1575-1647), where the web of sound is frequently quite magical, the latter also demonstrating effectively the instruments sonorous bass chords. English music of the 17th century features strongly, including Purcell’s Suite in G minor, Z.661 a particularly beguiling arrangement of ‘Music for a While’ and Dido’s lament. But arguably the highlight of the disc is the transposition of Handel’s keyboard Suite in B flat, HWV434, at once, as Vandersmissen notes, the most challenging music on the disc, especially in the Aria con variazione (iii), which calls for particularly nimble finger-work from a keyboard player or harpist. But the improvisatory Prelude, with its colourful arpeggiations, also works especially well. Vandersmissen’s own works – there are five brief compositions – draw both on the Baroque heritage associated with the instrument and more contemporary writing. Of these works I found ‘Between Words’, which incorporates the parlando quoting of a poem by Alice Nahon, an early 20th-century Flemish poet, quite mesmerizing, while the playful ‘Jig’ is arguably the most immediately appealing work.   

In all, I found the instrument’s greater scope for creating a more involved and involving sound scape made the disc more attractive listening than is normal with harp records, which it has to be confessed are not a first choice when it comes to recitals. Nonetheless, given the exceptionally generous playing time, I would advise against listening to the CD at one sitting. Listeners will gain a better impression of the outstanding quality of Lise Vandersmissen’s performances in smaller doses. She deserves that kind of attention.

Brian Robins

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Book

“Puote Orfeo col dolce suono”

Giacomo Sciommeri, “Puote Orfeo col dolce suono” Il mito di Orfeo nella cantata italiana del Seicento

Giacomo Sciommeri: “Puote Orfeo col dolce suono” Il mito di Orfeo nella cantata italiana del Seicento
Strumenti della ricerca musicale No. 24 of the Società Italiana di Musicologia.
Libreria Musicale Italiana,  Lucca: 2022
ISBN 978 88 5543 124 8
viii + 152pp. €20

The title in quotation marks is from the poetry of Benedetto Pamphilj, set by Handel as Hendel non può mia musa. The cover is Orfeo suona tra gli animali by Luca Giordano, ca. 1697 in the Palazzo Reale di Aranjuez in Madrid.

Giacomo Sciommeri’s fairly short book on ‘the myth of Orpheus in Italian cantatas of the 1600s’ gives a rigorous account of how it was acquired historically, understood allegorically, and treated by poets and composers of Italian 17th-century cantatas, thus influencing the development of the pastoral cantata genre in general. The full story of Euridice and Orfeo, which inspired the birth of opera (Ottavio Rinuccini’s L’Euridice by Peri and Caccini in 1600, Alessandro Striggio’s Favola d’Orfeo by Monteverdi in 1607, and Luigi Buti’s Orfeo by Luigi Rossi in 1647) sowed other seeds, from lyrical, dramatic and instrumental laments to Ranieri de’ Calzabigi’s Orfeo ed Euridice by Gluck and perhaps – my conjecture only – even to the magical power of music, one of its themes, that saves and matures Tamino and Pamina in Mozart’s Magic Flute. Readers may already know about these, but less about the presence or mere allusion to Orpheus in cantatas! Sciommeri gives us something entirely different. He chooses six poetic texts on different portions of the story, illustrating four of them analytically in relation to five musical settings.

Analytical studies can be ungrateful reading, finding only dedicated readers, whereas here the intense emotions of the protagonists and those around them, expressed poetically and musically, like Orpheus’s power to move birds, beasts, trees and rocks, is irresistible! We know the fable, as did the Baroque poets, whether from Virgil, Ovid, or the 1480 drama La Fabula di Orfeo by the Tuscan Renaissance poet Angelo Ambrogini (Poliziano) – the earliest known secular theatrical text in Italian, performed in Mantua, probably with music, ending with the Menads’ killing of Orpheus. Some even interpreted Orpheus’s failure to rescue Euridice from death (symbolizing the salvation of the ancient world), as the allegorical defeat of Humanism after the bloody Pazzi Conspiracy against the Medici in Florence of 1478.

Fascinating as Chapters 1 and 2 are (the first one tracing the myth of Orpheus from the classics to the cantata, and the second finding its aesthetic and rhetorical echoes in cantatas that are not necessarily mythological, both replete with poetic excerpts), Sciommeri intensifies the interest for musicians in the next four chapters. He gives a running musical analysis of five mythological Orpheus cantatas, comparing their treatments of the key elements of the fable: the love between Orpheus and Euridice; the power of his music; his descent to Hades and return (catabasis and anabasis); his death. He gives the complete lyrics and structure of these cantatas, with short musical excerpts from every aria and recitative, illustrating how each cantata presents a single episode of the story we know:

♦ Chapter 3: Fuor della stigia sponda (anon.) – the anabasis (ascent) of Orpheus as set by Alessandro Stradella and also by Antonio Foggia

♦ Chapter 4: Cadavero spirante (anon.) – the lament of Orpheus, attributed to Orazio Antonio Fagilla, a Neapolitan abbot.

♦ Chapter 5: Ove per gl’antri infausti (anon.) – the catabasis (descent) of Orpheus, set by Giovanni Lorenzo Lulier, a Roman. (There appear to be one or two wrong notes in ex. 5.7 bar 15, possibly present in one or both of the Roman copies. Harmonically and melodically a”’d” makes more sense than f♯”d”, preserving the sequential imitations, and similarly G instead of B in the continuo – notes off by one staff line, as here, are very common errors by copyists!) Studies of this cantata are mentioned in footnotes, notably by Biancamaria Brumana in Recercare XVII, LIM 2005, and in Quaderni di Esercizi. Musica e Spettacolo, 15, Morlacchi 2007.

♦ Chapter 6: Del lagrimoso lido (anon.) – the lament of Euridice, attributed to Alessandro Scarlatti (cf. edition by Rosalind Halton, Cantata Editions 2005). At the moment Euridice finds herself ‘abandoned’ among infernal flames she addresses Orpheus, expressing her grief and love, encouraging him to come. She begs Cupid not to torment her further and tells Orpheus that she died loving him, while fleeing from Aristeo, and hopes he will use his lyre to rescue her. It is one of three cantatas by Scarlatti based on the myth of Orpheus. See Poiché riseppe Orfeo and Dall’oscura magion dell’arsa Dite in Scarlatti, Alessandro, L’Orfeo, ed. Rosalind Halton, Web Library of 17th-Century Music, 2012, n. 23 www.sscm-wlscm.org and Alessandro Scarlatti, Tre cantate da camera sul mito di Orfeo ed Euridice, in preparation by Giacomo Sciommeri, to be available both in print and online: http://www.sedm.it/sedm/it/musica-vocale/111-scarlatti-orfeo.html.

Sciommeri’s considerations about the historical reception of the Orpheus myth in 17th-century literary circles should stimulate musicians, writers and composers to view the 18th-century pastoral cantata genre linking poetry and music more profoundly. The cantatas analyzed here may also give someone the idea of programming a group of Orpheus cantatas in the order of the narrative!

Barbara Sachs

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Recording

Fauré: Complete Works for Cello and Piano

CD cover Fauré for Cello and Piano Tong Michael

Robin Michael cello, Daniel Tong piano
63:21
resonus RES10343

A foray into Fauré – apologies, it was irrestible – on EMR? I have to confess that it is some while since my own musical path took me in this direction. Notwithstanding, some of our more astute readers will doubtless put two and two together with the recognition that ‘early music’ in this instance is applied in the sense that the performances are played on instruments  appropriate to the music, or set up to be. Thus the cello used here is a modern copy of an instrument made at the end of the 17th century by Matteo Goffriller, the founder of the Venetian luthier school, and strung with gut strings. It has a rich tone, with a particularly mellow lower register. The piano is an Erard of 1885.

The CD contains all the works Gabriel Faure composed for cello and piano over a period of some 40 years (if you count the early Berceuse, op 16, which was written for violin or cello). At its heart lie the two late sonatas, the first in D minor dating from 1918, the second in G minor from 1922, being one of the composer’s last major works. The remaining works are all small-scale salon pieces and include the Sicilienne, op 78 (1898), which will be familiar to many listeners from its use in the incidental music Fauré wrote for Maeterlinck’s Pelleas et Mélisande.

Both sonatas utilise music from Fauré’s opera Penelope, first given a long-awaited premiere at Monte Carlo in 1913. But in his excellent note Robin Michael also points to such early influences on Fauré such Renaissance polyphony and plainsong, influences that here reveal themselves in othe occasional hints of modality and rhythmic complexities. Those that think of the composer in terms of the Requiem, the popular piano music or the well-known songs, may indeed be surprised by the fragmentary grittiness of the main theme of the opening allegro of the D-minor Sonata, op 109, where the disjointed rhythm of the piano part creates a disconcertingly discursive effect only dissipated when the music settles to the more lyrical middle section of the movement. The final movement of the same sonata is dominated by an expressive falling motif full or ardent longing. The opening allegro of the G-minor sonata, op 117, is driven by an impatient, thrusting theme led by the piano, it demanding considerable dexterity from the player when later taken up by the cellist, requirements well met by Michael. Conversely, the central andante with its hints of a funeral procession needs an expressive cantabile line, the pianissimo ending of the movement creating a moment of magic from both players.

The smaller pieces require little comment. The fluttering cello part in Papillon, op 77 is brought off with virtuoso aplomb, while the lovely Berceuse, op 16 is lovingly coaxed by both players, in particular demonstrating effectively the sensuality of the cello’s middle register.

Overall these are immensely rewarding performances that have reminded me just how exceptional a composer Fauré is. The sole reservations are to wonder whether a marginally greater use of rubato might have been appropriate at times and to tentatively suggest the bowing in the Sicilienne might with advantage have been lighter. A rewarding, and for one coming to the music from an earlier period, revealing CD.

Brian Robins

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Recording

La Notte

CD cover La notte Cicic Illyrian Consort

Concertos and pastorales for Christmas Night
The Illyria Consort, Bojan Čičić
65:52
Delphian DCD34278

Opening with the predictable Vivaldi concerto La Notte and concluding with a premiere recording of a reconstruction by Olivier Fourés of Vivaldi’s string concerto RV270a Il riposo – per il santissimo Natale, this fascinating programme takes us on a wide-ranging tour through repertoire by Biber, Vejvanovsky, Rauch, Finger and Schmelzer. Since hearing Bojan Čičić play at the St Magnus International Festival in Orkney a couple of years ago, I have sought out his eloquent performances of Baroque music. This recording with his own ensemble The Illyria Consort is no disappointment, with stunning accounts of mainly unfamiliar repertoire. I found it difficult to put my finger on what appealed to me so much about Čičić’s playing, until a performance he gave in a small kirk in Orkney of the great Bach solo Chaconne moved him and all of us to tears, and I realised the extent to which his performances relied on his personal passion for his instrument and for the repertoire. This is what comes through in these performances too, as the wonderfully detailed and precise readings are injected with intelligence, musicality and above all passion. A major factor in the attractiveness of this CD is the crystal-clear Delphian sound, supervised by Peter Baxter and a hallmark of this excellent Scottish label. Just like a puppy, this revelatory recording is not just for Christmas, but provides deeply engaging insights into an important strand of Baroque string music.

D. James Ross

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Recording

Bach sous les tilleuls

CD cover Bach sous les tilleuls

Loris Barrucand, Clément Geoffroy harpsichords
53:00
Encelade ECL2303

What music was performed under the lime trees in the Zimmermann café gardens on Wednesday 17th June 1733, when the flier for the concert by Bach’s Collegium in Leipzig advertised a new harpsichord of a kind never heard before? With this question, the two harpsichordists Loris Barrucand et Clément Geoffroy devise a programme of transcriptions for their two Goujon-based instruments – one by Émile Jobin (1983) and the other by Jean-François Chaudeurge (2014). They introduce us to their transcriptions of two of Bach’s Vivaldi-based concerti for organ, BWV 593 & 596, and end with BWV 1060, taking their model 1061 which survives in two versions – one for just two harpsichords – from which they derive the licence to make this simple version of the triple concerto in A minor (BWV 1044). 

The rest of their programme offers us some chorale preludes – Nun komm der Heiden Heiland (BWV 659), Wachet auf (from BWV 140, but one of the six Schübler Preludes, BWV 645), a transcription of the Sonatina that opens BWV 106, the Pedal-Exercitium (BWV 598) and the great Passacaglia in C minor (BWV 582) which may have been conceived for a pedal harpsichord.  

The latter is the most successful version on the disc to my mind: the clarity of the fugal writing, the echo effects and the nimble arpeggio work all score well on this pair of full-blooded harpsichords. The Pedal-Exercitium is a reminder of how strong the bass resonance of the harpsichord is; but the treble can sing too, as the other chorale preludes and the slow movements show. The playing is neat and controlled, and I am glad they chose to record their disc in the spacious acoustic of a chapel rather than outside under the lime trees of Leipzig! 

What are we to make of these versions? While not autographs by Johann Sebastian himself, they continue his practice of repurposing and adapting which is well-documented in his own re-scoring of Vivaldi’s work and his remaking of several concerti for single instruments in their presumed Köthen originals for harpsichord when he took over to the Collegium in Leipzig in 1729. One of the few bonuses of the Covid lockdown that imposed such restraints on large-scale music-making was to spur musicians into activities like this: we have a welter of chamber music versions of larger scale works, and more CDs of the Sei Soli than we could dream of, as musicians re-discovered their instruments and explored new acoustics that helped us appreciate again how essentially polyphonic Bach’s compositions are – even when they are scored for a single line like BWV 598, the Pedal-Exercitium. 

So this disc is to be welcomed, not only for its musicianship, but for its reminder of the extraordinary multi-layered sound world in which Bach composed, adapted and re-purposed his music. 

David Stancliffe

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Recording

Meetings with Bach

CD cover Meetings with Bach

Emelie Roos recorder, Dohyo Sol lute
proprius PRCD2098

This is another CD that has its genesis in the Covid-19 lockdown, when musicians were constrained in their performance possibilities. It drove this pair – lutenist Dohyo Sol and recorder player Emelie Roos – outside, where they (like the harpsichordists Loris Barrucand and Clément Geoffrey in BACH SOUS LES TILLEULS which I reviewed earlier) imagined the sonorities available in the Bach household when Wilhelm Friedmann invited the lutenist Silvius Leopold Weiss to stay in 1739. They imagine that this was when Johann Sebastian improvised a free upper part to Weiss’s A major Suite for lute that was catalogued as BWV 1025.

Bach’s reported practice when playing basso continuo of improvising an additional fugal or canonic line rather than playing a conventional harmonic chord sequence is illustrated in Richard Stone’s arrangement of the 5th organ trio sonata in C (BWV 529) for his chamber ensemble, Tempesta del Mare, where Stone departs from a strict transcription of that trio sonata by introducing a fourth part for a viola, largely in canonic imitation, to supplement Bach’s three original voices. Bach’s ability to hear the implied harmonic structure of a particular melodic line is revealed by his pupil J. F. Agricola’s comment that Johann Sebastian would sometimes play one of the suites or partitas he had written for a solo instrument on a keyboard, filling out the implied harmonies:

“   …their author often played them on the clavichord himself and added as much harmony to them as he deemed necessary. In doing so he recognized the necessity of resonant harmony which in this kind of composition he could not otherwise attain.   ”

Such implied harmonies were occasionally actually written out by Bach, as in the Lute suite BWV 995 that is based on BWV 1011 (the ‘Cello Suite No. 5 in C minor) or the opening sinfonia to cantata BWV 29 which is based on BWV 1006.i (the Violin Partita 3 in E major).

This implies that the six partitas and sonatas for solo violin and the six ‘cello suites, although composed for a single instrument, are conceived primarily as compositions of a polyphonic nature, with the fugal and imitative lines being implied or suggested rather than being fully written out. This is what this duo accept as the basis of their versions, giving us a lute version of BWV 1008.

It is interesting to see these principles of implied polyphonic structures being worked out in the solo flute sonata by C.P.E. Bach – here transposed from A minor to C minor to suit the recorder. As in the lute transcription of BWV 1008, the dexterity of the players is in no doubt. We have an extended essay in “less is more” and are challenged again to take acoustics seriously as part of how we ‘hear’ the complex polyphonic structures of the 18th-century sound world in the years before every note and marking was written down in the definitive scores of printed editions. It also challenges our preconceived notions about the part that improvisation played in the music of Bach and his contemporaries as it grew beyond the improvised ‘divisions’ expected of cornetto players who were the predecessors of the violinists for whom Vivaldi wrote his concertos.

This is another CD that makes the case for enlarging our horizons as to what constitutes HIP.

David Stancliffe  

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Recording

Bach: Partitas

CD cover Bach Partitas re-imagined Pinnock

re-imagined for small orchestra by Thomas Oehler
Royal Academy of Music Soloists Enseble with guests from The Glenn Gould School, directed by Trevor Pinnock
69:47
Linn CKD 730

Under the heading of Re-imagining Bach comes a project spearheaded by the Principal of the Royal Academy of Music, Jonathan Freeman-Attwood, who produced this CD for Linn with the RAM’s crack chamber orchestra in 2003. He got the harpsichordist Trevor Pinnock to direct the players in a version of the Partitas orchestrated for a small chamber orchestra of 44331 strings plus flute, oboe, cor anglais and bassoon by Thomas Oehler, following Pinnock’s masterly direction of a similar group performing Józef Koffler’s orchestral version of the Goldberg Variations.

As a preparation for the project, the group met with Pinnock to read through Oehler’s score and to hear Pinnock play and expound the music on the harpsichord. A month later, they were ready to perform and record the score in Snape Maltings, with Freeman-Attwood producing.

Unlike some of the versions of – for example – The Art of Fugue, scored by the Netherlands All-of-Bach group under Shunske Sato for a variety of period instruments and voices, this performance not only scores harpsichord music for orchestra, but uses modern rather than period instruments, so readers beware!

But – unlike many of the versions of Bach played by the long-suffering Petroc Trelawny on Radio 3’s “Bach before 7”, where listeners seem to want to hear their Bach played on almost anything except what it was actually written for – here there is much to be learned about the process of re-imagining. Two-part textures ‘are split between different instruments and surrounded by a wash of expanded harmonies’ (Pinnock) and ‘the range of orchestral colours and textures . . . did not emerge from a pre-conceived subjective idea born in the mind of a self-calculating composer, but from what the original score suggested’ (Oehler).

I recommend listening both to this CD and to the All-of-Bach The Art of Fugue online, and pondering what the experience brings: the traffic is not all one-way!

David Stancliffe

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Recording

Bach: Concertos & Suite for recorder and strings

CD cover Bach Hugo Reyne Les Musiciens du Soleil

Hugo Reyne and Les Musiciens du Soleil
73:00
HugoVox 004

The experienced recorder player Hugo Reyne now lives in Les Sables d’Olone, where with his like-minded players who form Les Musiciens du Soleil, he has set up a festival and his own label, HugoVox. After a lifetime of pursuing French music of the Baroque – 11 Lully albums and 4 Rameau as a start – this CD is devoted to Bach, and he has reimagined three concertos and the Second Suite for recorder – using the two Altblockflöte that Bach wrote for in F and G.

He starts with BWV 1056 which has come down to us in a version in F minor for harpsichord, whose original form may well have been an oboe concerto from the Köthen period. He finds close similarities with Vivaldi’s recorder concerto in C minor (RV 441), and transposes it into C minor. For the second, he explores the recorder in G in an adaptation of BWV 1053, the harpsichord concerto in E transposed into C: he notes that the material was also used by Bach in cantatas 169 and 49. For the third, he steps beyond versions of harpsichord concertos to an adaption of Cantata BWV 209, Non sa che sia dolore, whose sinfonia and two arias, scored for traverso, soprano and strings are adapted for recorder and transposed up a tone into C. For the most part, the leading violin takes the vocal line in the two arias (Nos. 3 & 5), leaving the accompanying strings as they are. This reveals one of the potential weaknesses of the CD: while the viola and ‘cello/bass lines use single strings, there are three first and two second violins, so the texture is not quite as transparent as it might be with single strings all through.

There are fewer problems with the Second Suite, again transposed up a semitone into C. The French style of notes inégales is delightful in the Rondeau and Saraband, and if the 16′ bass is sometimes heavier than I would have liked, that is surely a matter of taste. He finishes the disc with a favourite encore, the Larghetto from BWV 1055, the harpsichord concerto in A.

I enjoyed the musicianship of the players and of Hugo Reyne in particular. The recorder can sometimes sound rather inflexible when compared to the traverso, but not here: it is flexible and melodically fluent in such capable hands. And his touch for how to repurpose music that has come down to us in its latest recension as harpsichord concertos, probably for the Collegium concerts in the Zimmerman Café, with shadowy pre-echoes of earlier versions seems entirely plausible. Bach reused his material in exactly this way and we should beware of thinking that the most recent version is automatically the best or most ‘finished’.

The pre-existence of trio sonata material that later found its way into concertos, organ works and many of the arias in cantatas that have come to be regarded as ‘solos’ with accompaniment should alert us to the great wealth of material which Bach was in the habit of repurposing himself when an opportunity arose.

David Stancliffe

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Recording

Scheidt: Liebliche Krafft-Bluemlein

CD cover Scheidt Liebliche Krafft-Bluemlein

Twelve duets accompanied by continuo
Marie Luise Werneburg soprano, Daniel Johannsen tenor, Collegium Instrumentale der Kathedrale St.Gallen, directed by Michael Wersin
59:21
cpo 555 513-2

It is difficult to imagine the circumstances in which this music was composed. Published in 1635, during the Thirty Years War, these duets set mostly Biblical texts (and a large percentage of those are from the Book of Psalms); the exception is Johann Walter’s “Herzlich tut mich erfreuen” which has four verses consisting of two rhyming couplets with a refrain. The rather grandly named “Collegium instrumentale…” consists – for this recording – of cello (or piccolo cello for a gamba sonata attributed to Buxtehude), chitarrone (also featured in two toccatas by Kapsberger) and a chamber organ (whose player directs the ensemble and wrote the booklet notes). This is not a recording that will fly to the top of the bestsellers lists, but it is a very valuable addition to the catalogue; the voices are pleasant on the ear and well matched, and the accompaniment is unfussy and stylish. I wonder that the organist did not also take a turn in the limelight (there is plenty of space on the disc), but I would also have rather heard more music from Halle and from the time than a spurious gamba sonata by a composer who was only born two years after Scheidt’s music was published.

Brian Clark