Voktett Hannover, la festa musicale, Lajos Rovatkay
59:41
audite 97.833
For the fourth volume of this excellent series, director-cum-musicologist Lajos Rovatkay has chosen to focus on Gregor Joseph Werner’s relationship with his teacher, Vice-Kapellmeister to the Viennese court, Antonio Caldara. As well as tracing the birth of the two-movement church sonata from sinfonie to the elder composer’s oratorios to an excellent sonata a4 by the pupil, it compares and contrasts their church music, culminating in a performance of a Requiem in G minor by “Werner”, which Rovatkay identified as featuring music by both composers (whether with or without the permission/knowledge of the teacher is not made explicit in one of the densest booklet notes I have ever read… faced with such an impenetrable text, I’m not surprised that even a highly skilled translator like Viola Scheffel struggled to save us from some of its obscurity!)
All eleven (!) singers of the Voktett Hannover (only one tenor and one bass sing on all the vocal tracks) are excellent; they blend beautifully and take the solos stylishly though I did long occasionally for some ornamentation when the dense counterpoint (for which both composers are rightly famed) allowed. Similarly, the string playing (33211 strings with chamber organ and lute) is stylish – nicely pointed bow strokes give the contrapuntal lines shape.
At a little under an hour, some might feel hard done by. However, with music of this quality (speaking as a self-confessed lover of fugal writing), I feel this is just about right. I also found myself hearing pieces of a musical jigsaw falling into place, hearing echoes of Legrenzi (reputedly Caldara’s Venetian teacher) and foretastes of Haydn (who followed Werner as Kapellmeister at Esterházy). It is remarkable that audite has thusfar produced four outstanding CDs of music by a relatively unknown composer and I for one hope there are more in the pipeline!
Brian Clark