Tag: Instrumental music

Categories
Recording

Lodovico Viadana: Sacri Concentus

CD cover Viadana Sacri Concentus

The Viadana Collective
Maximilien Brisson
75:01
Passacaille PAS 1142

This admirable CD from The Viadana Collective offers us a glimpse of a key figure in the background of music-making in the churches of northern Italy in late 16th and early 17th century Italy. One of the chief instructors and a notable composer in his own right was Viadana, very little of whose music has been recorded. He was in charge of the music at the cathedral in Mantua in the 1590s and this recording made in the Basilica di Santa Barbara there uses its historic Antegnati organ of 1565, which includes a 16’ Fiffaro rank, tuned to beat with the Principale which can be heard in track 17, as well as split keys for the ‘black notes’, so using a remarkably clean pre-Baroque Meantone tuning. What Viadana is chiefly remembered for is the creation of what we know as the figured bass or basso continuo, and his motets for single voices performed here with the fine full-bodied organ that he certainly knew, shows the motet shifting from a solid polyphonic style towards one in which a single line – often ornamented – is accompanied by at least the organ basso continuo, but sometimes with instruments substituting for the vocal lines. The group’s organist, Iason Marmaras, contributes some Intonazione in the style of Andrea Gabrieli to introduce each group of motets, which allows us to hear the organ on its own.

The motets here are largely from the collection Viadana published in a revised form in Frankfurt in 1615 as Centum sacri concentus ab una voce sola ecclesiastici which are harmonically more adventurous and belong more distinctively of the seconda prattica than his earlier collection Centum concerti ecclesiastici of 1602. This argues Maximilien Brisson, the moving spirit behind this welcome production, was a seminal contribution to the emerging solo monody, where consideration for the voice type as well as close attention to the speech rhythms of the text placed this work at the forefront of the new monody in church music.

These are contrasted with ensemble singing which reveals that the singers in the single voice motets, where their vocal agility and stylish word painting is so much in evidence also make an impressive ensemble, so key in performances like this with absolute parity between voices and instruments. The singers are Suzie LeBlanc, Vicki St Pierre, Charles Daniels and Roland Faust and they show in Vinea mea how important it is to have such a clean, violone-like bass as the foundation for such an ensemble.

Bruce Dickey sets the instrumental style with amazing diminutions in O quam suavis. And I was unprepared for the equally remarkable passaggii played by Maximilien Brisson in Rognoni’s divisions on Lassus’s Susanne ung jour. There is also an example of Viadana’s instrumental Sinfonie musicale a otto voci (Venice 1610), virile instrumental canzone in two 4-part cori.

In style, the Viadana Collective has some things in common with groups like Jamie Savan’s Gonzaga Band and Gawain Glenton’s In Echo. Distinctive about this fine CD however is that it concentrates on a single composer and affirms the importance of a substantial organ of the right period as a foundation for a convincing balance where voices and instruments have absolute parity, substituting regularly for one another.

This is not only a welcome addition to our understanding of this hinge moment in western music, but also essential listening and a delight throughout. I thoroughly recommend it.

David Stancliffe

Categories
Recording

Lost in Venice

CD cover Infermi d'amore Lost in Venice Vadym Makarenko

Infermi d’Amore, Vadym Makarenko
65:12
eudora EUD-SACD-2206

This programme of music for strings incorporating concerti for solo violin, two violins, and cello respectively, and a sinfonia by Vivaldi, as well as an overture by Veracini and a violin concerto by Marcello, has been selected to represent a body of work which has been lost, left unfinished or found its way mysteriously to Venice. Some of the music has had to be reconstructed for the recording and – incredibly – two of the Vivaldi violin concertos and the sinfonia are recorded here for the first time. If the linking principle may seem a little tenuous, and the musicians should not feel the need to excuse performing such effective music, there is in fact a fugitive feel to many of these performances which seems to suit the music. The small ensemble of one solo and four ripieno violins, one viola, one cello and double bass, with bassoon, theorbo/guitar and organ/harpsichord gives the texture a volatility which is perfectly suited to this repertoire, and the players take full advantage of this with their spontaneous approach. The solo playing from violinist Vadym Makarenko and cellist Bruno Hurtado Gosalvez is stunningly effective, and this truly international ensemble whose members met up while studying at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis exudes energy and enthusiasm.

D. James Ross

Categories
Recording

Vestiva: Embellishing 16th & 17th Century Music

CD cover Vestiva Embellishing 16th and 17th Century Music

Lux Musicæ London
58:00
First Hand Records FHR137

I was blissfully unaware of the fundamental effect a recording by David Munrow and his Morley Consort of Morley’s Consort Lessons of 1599 featuring extended divisions had had on a teenage me until I invested in the CD version some forty years later and realised that it had truly entered my bloodstream and become the basis of most of my embellishment instincts throughout a subsequent lifetime of playing Renaissance music. I would like to think this delightful CD might have the same effect on young performers, and indeed this ambition is expressed towards the end of the programme note. Lux Musicae (harpist Aileen Henry, recorder player Mirjam-Luise Münzel and lutanist Toby Carr) deftly take us through a selection of ‘written out’ embellishments of Renaissance and Baroque pieces as well as applying the wisdom of various embellishment instruction books of the period to other pieces. The results could so easily have sounded ‘worthy’, but in the hands of these gifted musicians the music comes wonderfully to life, and we are given a little flavour of how embellishment became such an indispensable skill for musicians of this period. The witty reference to the madrigal Vestiva i colli providing the title of the CD and alluding to the idea of flowers clothing the mountains much as embellishment clothes the original scores is indeed pertinent. Mirjam-Luise Münzel employs recorders based on illustrations by Ganassi. It was the purchase in the 1970s of a facsimile of Ganassi’s Fontegara (1535), a recorder tutor and one of the main sources of manners of embellishment, that first opened my eyes to the complexities of Renaissance ornamentation. I have yet to hear the more outrageous suggestions in this publication such as trills on thirds and fourths and dense diminutions of original phrases put into practice – perhaps they were never intended to be taken literally, or maybe they were and have yet to transform our understanding of the art of Renaissance embellishment.

D. James Ross

Categories
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

Categories
Recording

Ensaladas by Mateo Flecha ‘El viejo’

Cantorías Ensaladas

Cantoría
54:17
Ambronay AMY 315

We have to thank the Eeemerging programme for introducing the vocal quartet Cantoría to a wider audience, and on the basis of this excitingly dynamic selection of ensaladas by the 16th-century Spanish composer Mateo Flecha ‘the elder’ they are a group deserving of exposure. Eleven ensaladas by Flecha survive of which we have seven here. These extended episodic songs in four and five parts, offer graphic depictions of a wide variety of situations and events, and were hugely popular throughout Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries in the hands of the likes of Clément Janequin, Adriano Banchieri and Orlando Gibbons. While Flecha probably also wrote church music, it is his Ensaladas that have survived and which have established his reputation. With its restlessly changing tempi and harmonies, this is demanding music to perform successfully, and Cantoría find the perfect combination of vocal blend and solistic characterisation, while maintaining an engaging impression of spontaneity. Particularly impressive is their account of La Guerra, a hectic sound-picture of a Renaissance battle complete with sound effects, battle cries and shouts of victory. The war movie of its time, the battle chanson was a way for Renaissance aristocrats to relive their battlefield successes and for their courtiers and partners to share in their experiences. The Joust provides another fine opportunity for a vivid sound representation of more organised combat, and again Cantoría rise to the challenge with some wonderfully powerful fanfaring and some entertainingly jazzy galloping.

D. James Ross

Categories
Recording

Septem dies: Seven Days with Music at Prague University (1360-1460)

Septem dies Corina Marti, Schola Gregoriana Pragensis

Schola Gregoriana Pragensis, Corina Marti
63:51
Supraphon SU 4282-2

In their efforts to provide a snapshot of the complete musical lives of students at Prague University in the century from 1360-1460, Corina Marti and the Schola Gregoriana have drawn on the work of a number of musicologists on the University’s considerable collection of musical manuscripts to provide sacred and secular monophony and polyphony for this varied and beautifully executed programme. The singing is wonderfully idiomatic, the singers sounding equally at home in plainchant and polyphony, while Marti provides instrumental interludes and accompaniments on the clavisimbalum. In this way, liturgical music relevant to the seven-day round of religious services is punctuated by student songs and instrumental pieces of the sort they would have played for entertainment. A lavish book of background information provides an intriguing context for the music, and the whole package is a testimony to the very fruitful interaction of scholars and performers. Much of the music here has been freshly transcribed and is receiving its first performance in modern times. The whole team behind this admirable and vivid recording, made in the generous acoustic of the Basilica of the Visitation of the Virgin Mary in Milevsko, has more than achieved its stated aim of representing the musical landscape that would have confronted a student at Prague University in the 14th and 15th centuries.

D. James Ross

Categories
Recording

Nuit à Venise

CD cover Ensemble Les Surprises Camboulas Nuit à Venise

Ensemble Les Surprises, directed by Louis-Noël Bestion de Camboulas
68:47
Alpha Classics 927

In an interview included in the booklet the conductor (henceforth Camboulas to avoid repetition of his unusually complex name) tells us in typically imaginative French style that he wanted on this disc to ‘reimagine a large-scale evening of festivities not only on the Piazza San Marco and in the Basilica, but also in the gardens and salons of the city’s palaces’. If this suggests the CD is aiming at an unspecialised audience, such suspicions are enhanced by the total omission of any source references or even context, where it exists, there being no notes other than the interview.  Such sloppy presentation is unforgivable in this day and age, ‘Cavalli – Agnus Dei’ being of little help to anyone (it comes from the Missa Concertata, published in Musiche sacra, 1656).

It is all the more regrettable given that the music is exceptionally well performed and largely avoids more obvious choices, Lotti’s famous 8-part Crucifixus being perhaps the only real exception to that. That searing piece can also be used as an illustration of one of the real strengths of the vocal performances, which to their great benefit are performed one voice to a part. The strength referred to is the unfailing sweetness of tone of the two sopranos of Les Surprises, Jehanne Amzal and Eugénie Lefebvre, which is complemented by the fine voices and excellent ensemble of the remaining six voices. The ensemble as a whole seems equally at home with the athletic vocal agility required for the bravura writing in items such as Monteverdi’s ‘Dixit Dominus secondo’, SV 264 (from the Selva morale e spirituali, 1641) or ‘Laudate Dominum primo’ from the same collection, though the latter is a rare instance where I don’t agree with Camboulas’ tempo, it sounding to me too rushed to allow the singers to articulate the text with the necessary clarity. 

Among the lesser-known works included two brief pieces, ‘Ingemisco’ and ‘Oro supplex’ from Giovanni Legrenzi’s 8-part Prosa pro Mortuis (Dies Irae) particularly stand out for their exquisite penitential dissonance, the former for full choir based on falling sequences, the latter an alto solo. The Cavalli ‘Agnus Dei’ is another jewel, alternating homophony and polyphony, and here sung with wonderful breadth and rapt inner spirituality.

Despite Camboulas’ intimation of a mixture of sacred and profane, there are no secular vocal items included, though the presence of a couple of settings of typically sensual texts from the Song of Song’s (Alessandro Grandi’s 3-part ‘O quam tu pulchra es’ and Monteverdi’s ‘Pulchrae sunt genae tuae’, a contrafactum (not by Monteverdi) of the madrigal ‘Ferir quel petto, Silvio?’ from the Fifth Book might be thought compensation, and we are also given an instrumental arrangement of another madrigal from Book 5, ‘Troppo ben puo’. Otherwise, instrumental items are liberally scattered throughout the selection, making for a nicely contrasted programme that would make for an excellent introduction to 17th-century Venetian repertoire. In case my above admonishments about presentation have aroused concerns about texts, full texts and translations are included and the recording in the Abbaye aux Dames at Saintes is atmospheric.  

Brian Robins

Categories
Recording

Haydn – Symphonies 13 – “Hornsignal”

CD cover Haydn Hornsignal Antonini

Il Giardino Armonico, conducted by Giovanni Antonini
80:18
Alpha Classics Alpha 692

This latest addition to Giovanni Antonini’s outstanding integral Haydn cycle turns to a trio of symphonies that fall into the category of what the notes delightfully term Haydn’s ‘horn-heavy’ symphonies. Particularly notable among these is, of course, No. 31 in D, nick-named the ‘Hornsignal’ and a work older readers may recall was a great favourite of Sir Thomas Beecham’s. There are few more thrilling openings in music than that of the ‘Hornsignal’, with the unusual scoring of four horns braying their brave fanfares with aplomb and total lack of inhibition. The symphony dates from 1765, around the time Haydn had become de facto Kapellmeister at Esterházy. There is indeed much about this symphony to suggest that Haydn was using it give the players of what had virtually become ‘his’ orchestra a showcase in which to show off their talents. The Adagio (ii) is a three-way dialogue between the horns, a solo violin and solo viola, while the Finale (Moderato molto) opens with a cantabile melody – beautifully played by the strings of Il Giardino Armonico – before proceeding to a set of variations in which cello, flute, violin and horns (of course) are all given a place in the limelight, the whole rounded off by the double-bass – a winning idea – before the tempo speeds up for a brief Presto coda. The whole symphony is in Haydn’s best ‘great entertainer’ mode, having no pretensions to profundity; it is accepted as such with relish by Antonini’s splendid players just as it must have been by Haydn’s.

Symphony No 59, known as the ‘Fire’ Symphony, dates from four years later. No convincing explanation has been advanced for the name, but it seems to stem from a mid-19th-century catalogue of Haydn’s work, where the name ‘La Tempesta’ is also associated with it. Whatever the background the name is not inappropriate, since from the outset the symphony has an unpredictability, even eccentricity about it that may recall the leaping of flames from one point to another. There is also a strong element of theatricality as in the second movement, where the steady slow march-like motif gives way to cantabile strings and later rude outbursts from the horns. The finale is a glorious romp, with horns again to the fore and, in this performance, a truly exhilarating sense of forward momentum.

Also from 1769 is Symphony No 48, known as ‘Maria Theresia’ from the probability of it having been composed for the name-day of the Austrian empress.  Again the outer movements in Antonini’s performance are notable for the high-level energy, outstanding balance, and bravura playing (horns to the fore again) that has been such an outstanding characteristic of the series as a whole, but here I’d like to focus on the exquisitely lovely playing of the Adagio (ii). Muted strings and veiled horns give the opening a distanced, in lontano impression, while mysterious murmuring broken chords evoke a nocturnal atmosphere. The silky refined beauty of the string playing is breathtaking.

This is another stellar addition to a cycle that is already well-proven to be infinitely and endlessly rewarding, each issue leaving the listener impatiently awaiting its successor.

Brian Robins

Categories
Recording

Samâ-ï : Cosmopolitan Aleppo

CD cover samâ-ï cosmopolitan Aleppo

Canticum Novum, Emmanuel Bardon
73:20
Ambronay AMY060

Click HERE to buy this on amazon.co.uk
[Sponsored links like these keep this site alive and FREE!]

This haunting CD of music associated with the diverse cultures of Aleppo is charged with additional melancholy in light of the knowledge that this millennia-old city has in our own times been reduced to rubble. Canticum Novum, a large ensemble incorporating voices and traditional instruments such as the oud, duduk, nyckelharpa, zurna, ney and kaval as well as conventional early instruments such as viol, lute and triple harp, invokes the rich musical cultures of a city which has stood at a cultural crossroads for five millennia. Emmanuel Bardon, who drew the ensemble together in 1996, has consciously mixed world music and early music ethoses in an effort to access this sometimes nebulous and ancient repertoire. If this music and these performances lack the academic credentials we would normally expect of European early music recordings, like Jordi Savall, Christina Pluhar and a growing number of fine musicians searching outside Europe and in more remote centuries, Bardon relies on instinct and musicality to breathe life into this music. The result is a wonderfully atmospheric evocation of an eastern metropolis renowned for its diversity and tolerance, qualities which may recently have been bombed into extinction.

D. James Ross

Categories
Recording

Unsung Heroine | Vision

CD cover Unsung Heroine Vision Beatriz de Dia Hildegard of Bingen the telling

The Imagined Life and Love of Beatriz de Dia
The Imagined Testimony of Hildegard of Bingen
The Telling
74:37
First Hand Records FHR123

Click HERE to buy this on amazon,co.uk
[Using these sponsored links keeps this FREE site alive]

The genesis of this CD is by no means simple, so it is important to give an outline of it here. In May 2021, one of the two singers of the ensemble The Telling, Ariane Prüssner, died prematurely and unexpectedly. The Telling had specialised in touring dramatisations of narratives compiled from early musical sources, and their latest two projects had been Unsung Heroine and Vision (detailed above). The soundtracks to arthouse films, these performances were recorded mainly in single takes and never intended for release in CD form. The music on the CD is extracted from larger works and verses are omitted, and where Hildegard left more than enough music to speak entirely with her own voice, Beatriz left only five songs, and her ‘life’ is eked out here with music by various other more familiar male troubadours. Fine musicians all, The Telling provide dynamic and convincing performances of this music which need no apology, and – notwithstanding the unusual and sad circumstances surrounding it – this is a very worthwhile project and a suitable testimony to the remarkable individual talents of Ariane Prüssner, but also to the combined dynamic of this distinctive ensemble. These two imaginative and dramatically effective sequences of vocal and instrumental music shed a valuable light on two musically gifted women, one very familiar and one still relatively unknown.

D. James Ross