Tag: Choral music

Capella Musicale di Santa Barbara, Umberto Forni
54:42
Tactus TC570701

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his sequence of music for two choirs and instruments by Amante Franzoni was published in 1613 while he was employed as maestro di cappella at the Basilica of Santa Barbara in Mantua and seems to constitute service music for St Barbara. It is recorded live in the cavernous acoustic of the Basilica itself, lending proceedings a certain authority, and indeed the recording begins with an audible tumble-weed moment as the acoustic space is established. There are also a couple of not entirely convincing cross edits, the tuning isn’t always 100% and there are a couple of instrumental fluffs as well as audience coughs and occasional unexplained ‘noises off’, but generally this is a competent performance of music which is receiving its premiere performance. Franzoni proves to be a capable polychoral composer of the post-Gabrieli school and handles his large-scale forces with confidence and creativity. We might have wished that the performers had returned to the Basilica on a later occasion without their audience and placed their microphones more opportunely for a recording, which better reflected their undoubted talents and those of Franzoni, but the present recording gives an adequate impression of what might have been. We would recall that at one time Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespers were thought to be associated with the Basilica of St Barbara in Mantua, and although on a more modest scale, Franzoni’s 1613 publication seems to be a similar sort of musical enterprise.

D. James Ross

Allabastrina Choir and Consort, Elena Sartori
59:35
Brilliant Classics 95592

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]hese performances of two great masterpieces by Jean Baptiste Lully are extremely beautiful in every respect. Concise and beautifully balanced instrumental playing is matched by choral and solo singing of a very high order. The ensembles have clearly digested completely the idiosyncratic style of this music, and their effortless and utterly convincing ornamentation, their smooth alternation between solo and tutti sections and their consistently beautiful tone and blend are simply exemplary. I was not as familiar with the Dies irae  as I am with the Te Deum, but this recording has won me over to the considerable virtues of a fine and powerful funeral composition. Elena Sartori is professor of choral singing at the Claudio Monteverdi Conservatoire in Bolzano, and her expertise both with the scores and with her choral forces is apparent. I am perhaps duty bound to mention a couple of omissions in this package – neither texts nor translations are provided, although of course both are easily accessed online, but curiously the accomplished soloists are also not identified. Perhaps this is a consequence of the Allabastrina ethos in which the group is regarded as ‘an alchemical combination of friendship, vocal and instrumental entente’. Often such mission statements come across as pretentious, but in this case the proof of the pudding is in the listening.

D. James Ross

17th-Century Music for the Time of Advent and Christmas
Margaretha Consort, Marit Broekroelofs
78:15
Naxos 8.551398

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his recording follows a pattern familiar from several other recent releases, presenting various settings of the same text within single tracks. Thus, for example, we have the Lord’s Prayer (Vater Unser…) by Hans Leo Hassler, Johann Steigleder and Jacob Praetorius. The performances are given by nine solo singers (SSSAATTBB), a congregation and a group of instrumentalists playing viols, a cornetto, drums and bells, a chamber organ and the church organ. Taking the aforementioned track as an example, the Lord’s Prayer is performed instrumentally, but the first version (Hassler) is noticeably quicker than the second (viol consort) and the third (bass viol playing the melody under organ ornamentation) is at another speed; then comes a mysterious “Part 4” which appears to be an arrangement (of what?) featuring some beautifully executed, incredibly intricate ornamentation on the cornetto. All of this is wonderful and provides a rich, varied and valuable insight into the world of musicians of the time, but ultimately it is artificial since no 17th-century performance could ever have actually been like this. The booklet notes explain this away convincingly enough, but they do not mention the (to me, at least) unnecessary and unnecessarily polyrhythmic percussion parts added at various junctures – they’re just a needless distraction (again, my opinion). In short, this is a nice recording of fine performances in a variety of styles of popular music for the festive period.

Brian Clark

Le Concert Spirituel, Hervé Niquet
60:31
Alpha Classics Alpha 400

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his is a welcome first recording of this Benevoli Mass, one of the glories of the Roman colossal baroque. Written for four four-voiced choirs, Niquet doubles up each choir with another one, in a manner typical of Roman performance practice in the 17th century. Taking advantage of balconies in the recording venue, the groups are split up at a considerable distance and each has its own conductor to relay Niquet’s beat (there is a video of part of the recording on Youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6mHJNKOSXs). This again reproduces Roman practice. Less typical of that practice, however, is the strong presence of wind instruments. By the 1660s when this Mass was probably written, cornetts and sackbuts were very rare in Rome; singers predominated, supported by violoni or bass violins and organs, with a few violins. Niquet here uses a choir of cornett and sackbuts as well as one of dulzians, so that the sound world is both wind-heavy and old-fashioned, too early 17th-century Venetian perhaps, to be true to Benevoli. The recording engineers have done sterling work and the effect of being placed as a listener at the centre of all of these groups is very effective, but the winds overpower the singers at times and, particularly, muddy the texts. That said, the orchestration is successful and there are quieter moments and good contrast between textures, though some singing with organ only would have been welcome in the Mass – in the Christe, for example. The long full tutti sections at the end of each movement are enormously powerful and performed with a strong sense of momentum and inevitability. The other works on the CD provide lots of contrast, from the motet Regna Terrae for twelve sopranos, to some excellent instrument-only playing in Palestrina’s Beata es, virgo Maria and in a Frescobaldi canzona. Monteverdi’s Cantate Domino, sung as an Introit, is anomalous and serves only to emphasise the Venetian quality of the sound throughout. Even more anomalous is the plainchant, performed quickly and rhythmically in a medieval manner with drones, rather than the slow festive unornamented way we know was sung in the 17th century. Benevoli’s sixteen-voice Magnificat is included as a communion motet, which is strange, but is a welcome addition nonetheless. Something of an odd mix then, from the purist’s point of view, but an exciting result which certainly gives us a vivid appreciation of Benevoli’s individual voice. The group uses transcriptions made by the late Jean Lionnet, a crucial figure both in researching Roman baroque music and in encouraging its performance by French groups. It is hard to believe that it is twenty years since his untimely passing.

Noel O’Regan

Sarah Wegener, David Allsopp, Thomas Hobbs, Peter Harvey SATB, Kammerchor Stuttgart, Barockorchester Stuttgart, Frieder Bernius
Carus 83.282
49:03
+ Missa in G minor, BWV235

[dropcap]I[/dropcap] would like to hear Bach’s short masses recorded/performed alongside the cantata movements on which they are based (I’ve done this myself with the F major). There would certainly have been room for such an approach on this rather brief CD. In their own terms, these performances are splendid – the opening ritornello is just gorgeous (JSB is a factor in this, of course) and the star ratings reflect this.

The soloists (three of them English) are equally accomplished in some demanding music – Bach’s re-texting of the cantata arias is not always seamless. I must say that I miss the inauthentic trumpet parts from BWV 80! However, without them, the ear re-focuses from sheer sonic splendour to Bach’s astonishing contrapuntal skill which in these hands is still very much a rewarding musical experience. The booklet contains all that it should, though the English version of the main essay omits some of the interesting contextual information included in the German original.

But there will be those who would have been much happier to hear fewer performers than are on display here – a choir of 21 (7-5-5-4) and orchestra with strings 55321 – expert and impressively unanimous though these are. Conductor Frieder Bernius has been admired for several decades as ‘a pioneer of historical performance practice’. But is ‘historical performance practice’ really what he is offering? It sounds to me more like a modern performance practice using historical instruments.

David Hansell