Tag: Vocal music

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Recording

Beethoven Arranged

CD cover of Beethoven arrangements for tenor and chamber ensemble

Ilker Arcayürek tenor, Ludwig Chamber Players
71:09
cpo 555 355-2
12 Variations on a theme from Handel’s oratorio Judas Maccabaeus, Septet op. 20, Adelaide, An die ferne Geliebte

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This CD features a performance on modern instruments of Beethoven’s famous and seminal Septet in tandem with modern arrangements for instruments and tenor voice by Andreas N Tarkmann and M Ucki of the Beethoven songs ‘Adelaide’ and the extended ‘An die ferne Geliebte’, and an octet arrangement of Beethoven’s homage to Handel – a set of variations for cello and piano of ‘See the Conquering Hero Comes’ from his Judas Maccabaeus. The performance of the Septet is delightfully detailed, while the modern arrangements for chamber ensemble use the Septet as their model, and make very effective use of the available combinations of wind and stringed instruments. It is easy forget how ground-breaking and influential Beethoven’s Septet was when it first appeared in 1800, directly inspiring Schubert’s (in my opinion far superior) Octet and much of the larger-scale chamber music of the Romantic period. My favourite track on the CD is the Tarkmann arrangement of ‘An die ferne Geliebte’, possibly because it was the strongest composition to start with, but also I think because of the way the imaginative octet instrumentation enhances the original. Iker Arcayürek is a thoughtful and highly expressive solo tenor, who responds positively to being accompanied by a chamber ensemble rather than the customary piano. My one reservation is that in allocating the original piano part, the arrangements feel free to make demands on the modern instruments (particularly the clarinet) which would simply have been beyond the scope of the instruments of the period. Playing modern instruments, The Ludwig Players make light of this, but these remain obviously modern arrangements for modern instruments.

D. James Ross

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Recording

Ockeghem: Les Chansons

CD cover of Chansons by Ockeghem Cut Circle

Cut Circle, Jesse Rodin
133:40 (2 CDs in a hardbacked book, CD size)
Musique en Wallonie MEW1995

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It is always a joy to anticipate listening to music by Ockeghem, who was born at St Ghislain, near Mons, probably between 1410 and 1420, and died in 1497, probably at Tours.  This pleasure can, however, be tempered depending upon the quality and interpretation of the music. Not only do we as listeners have our own agendas for hearing music, but also performers have their agendas for performing it. For instance, it is possible for the listener to tolerate an indifferent performance which is nonetheless interpreted acceptably, while excellent musicians can have bees in their bonnets which result in performances which sound ghastly or just plain silly. Indeed, sometimes within one recording project, interpretations and performances can vary between the sublime and the ridiculous. So while there are few finer prospects than listening to the entire corpus of songs by Ockeghem, there remains the question of what the performances will actually sound like: will repeated hearings seem an attractive proposition, or will there be aspects of them that seem like continually running one’s tongue over a sore in the mouth?

First, what of the music itself? How could this be other than wonderful when it consists of all twenty surviving songs with secure attributions to Ockeghem? In fact, this double album consists of 24 songs, two other items being his arrangement for four voices of a song for trio by the (probably) Spanish composer Juan Cornago, and his arrangement in two parts of the famous O rosa bella nowadays attributed to the English composer John Bedyngham, plus Ockeghem’s lament for Binchois Mort tu as navre and Josquin’s lament for Ockeghem himself. Half the items can be heard sung by another American ensemble, Blue Heron, on Johannes Ockeghem: complete songs volume one (Blue Heron BHCD 1010), which I reviewed for EMR on 21 February 2020. The majority of the songs are rondeaux, many of the rest virelais. Although there is a prevailing tone of melancholy throughout the oeuvre, there are subtleties of emphasis, illustrated early in the collection by downright depression in Presque transi or passionate devotion in Ma maitresse, the mood punctured by the boisterous L’autre d’antan which takes its cue from references in the text to dancing. Then melancholy is restored by the agonised introspection of Ma bouche rit. And so it continues, the first disc concluding with the three-part version of the ululatory Je n’ay deuil, followed by the assertive Les desleaulx and finally Tant fuz, its introspective first stanza contrasting with a more animated second, reflecting the structure of the virelai. The second disc continues in a similar vein: melancholy or downbeat songs interspersed with others of a different disposition, all with the same variety of outlook, intensity of expression and musical magnetism. The disc begins with S’elle m’armera/petite camusette, another of the few songs in four parts, its text described in the excellent booklet (written by the conductor Jesse Rodin) as both silly and ridiculous but with its musical integrity intact thanks to Ockeghem’s versatility. Disc 1 includes Ockeghem’s arrangement for four voices of Juan Cormago’s cancion Qu’es mi vida, already mentioned, and the other arrangement mentioned above occurs on disc 2, an altus discantus added to Bedyngham’s discantus in his famous O rosa bella, a project which provoked one musicologist to ask petulantly why Ockeghem bothered! Listeners can also enjoy his rightly famous Fors seulement l’attente, placed before his own Fors seulement contre seemingly a riposte which takes over its tenor. In some cases it is the entire structure of a piece which creates the impression, such as the almost contorted canon which is Prenez sur moy while in others it is a detail such as the intriguing downward octave scale in the bass part of Ung aultre. Finally, the disc, and the entire double album, concludes with Mort tu as navre, Ockeghem’s sublime lament a4 for Binchois, a work impressive even by Ockeghem’s elevated standards.

Does the performance of these works match their musical standard? In insight, yes; in commitment, yes; in technical expertise, yes: listen, for example, to the fine singing low in her register by the soprano Sonja DuToit Tengblad in the riveting La despourveue. Nevertheless, the listener’s personal taste must come into play. On the minus side, the first word of the first track, Josquin’s lament for Ockeghem, is bellowed, and with plenty of alternative versions available, I shall not return to listen to this overly assertive interpretation again, albeit the reasoning for this clarion call is provided in the booklet, and might well meet with the approval of other listeners. In one or two songs such as S’elle m’armera some singers use knowingly affected portamento, which becomes irritating upon repeated hearings. On the plus side, every note in every song is democratically audible, and its relationship with every other note is clearly expressed, the harmony and the melody, in other words the vertical and the horizontal, musically comprehensible. Great care is taken in conveying the unique meaning of each song: listening to the songs can be like observing the interior workings of so many sophisticated timepieces; yet it is perfectly possible to listen to all these works simply for pleasure, for the sheer beauty of the music itself, and for the emotions they express. The singers use very open vowel sounds but apart from a small scattering of instances, this is not otherwise jarring. The fabric of Blue Heron’s performances is more finely spun, and they – very sparingly and tastefully – use instruments, so there is sufficient overall difference between the two sets to offer either choice, or the pleasure of possessing alternative perspectives on (for now) half of the pieces. As for Cut Circle, the intensity and intelligence of their performances won me over after a disastrous start, as subsequently did their audible – and infectious – enjoyment in performing these exquisite and enchanting songs. 

Richard Turbet

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Recording

Monteverdi: Il Terzo Libro de’ Madrigali

Concerto Italiano Monteverdi terzo libro

Concerto Italiano, Rinaldo Alessandrini
64:33
naïve OP 30580

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Monteverdi’s appointment to the court of Mantua in 1590 or 1591 brought to the young composer new opportunities, not the least of which was contact with the Mantuan maestro di cappella Giaches de Wert, one of the great madrigalists of the day, and two of the greatest poets active at of the end of the 16th century: Giovanni Guarini and Torquato Tasso, both occasional visitors to Mantua. Monteverdi’s arrival was also near- coincidental with the recent succession to the duchy of Vincenzo Gonzago, whose expansion of court musical activity included the establishment of a consort of singers modelled on the famous ‘concerto delle dame’ in the rival court at Ferrara.

Put all the above ingredients into the mixer and you arrive at Monteverdi’s third book of madrigals, Il terzo libro de’ madrigali, published in 1592. For Guarini, whose erotic poetry provided the bulk of Monteverdi’s settings in Book 3, and the taste for the sensual combination of high voices established at Ferrara it is necessary to look no further than the delicate tapestry of the first half of the opening madrigal, ‘La giovinetta pianta’, the luminescent texture employed in talking of ‘the tender young plant’ perhaps less potent than in more serious texts but sensuous none the less. All the madrigals in Book 3 are scored for five voices, still of course a cappella at this point in the composer’s development. One of the remarkable features is the manner in which Monteverdi consistently alternates contrasts of colour between high and low voices and texture between polyphony and homophony, nearly always to dramatic purpose. These characteristics are well illustrated in the final madrigal of the collection, the two-part ‘Rimanti in pace’, to a text by Livio Celiano, a pen name for Angelo Grillo. The declamatory poem is part direct speech and part narrative, the composer clearly differentiating the two by giving the parting Tirso’s departing words to his Fillida, ‘Stay and peace be with you’, given to upper voices, while those narrated are darker and more homophonic. The brief cycle comes to a shattering conclusion with the reiteration of Fillida’s unbearably poignant motif, ‘Deh, cara anima mia’ (Tell me, dear heart of mine … who takes you from me?).

Such settings mark a foretaste of the innate dramatic gifts that would eventually lead to Monteverdi becoming the first great opera composer. They are even more in evidence in a pair of three-part cycles in which the text is drawn from episodes in Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, the first, ‘Vattene pur crudel’ describing the fury and then torment of Armida deserted by Rinaldo, the second the distress of the Christian knight Tancredi after he has killed the Saracen warrior-maiden Clorinda, a topic to which Monteverdi would return memorably in Book 8 almost fifty years later. The former, again a declamatory alternation of direct speech and narrative, the latter vividly descriptive at the point at the end of part 2, where Armida, faint from extreme emotion, lapses into unconsciousness as quiet dissonance takes over before the third part opens with a magical evocation of ‘nothing but empty silence all about her’ greets the reviving Armida.

The madrigal ensemble of Rinaldo Alessandrini’s Concerto Italiano has gone through several reincarnations since he first started recording Monteverdi’s madrigals. Indeed Alessandro reminds us in a booklet note that it is fifteen years since his last complete madrigal book recording (Book 6). The present ensemble is at least a match for any of its predecessors, with both individuality – the two leading sopranos, Francesca Cassinari and Monica Piccinini, have pleasingly differentiated voices – and an excellent blend that retains enough clarity to allow contrapuntal strands to stand out clearly. Diction and articulation, too, are excellent. Just once or twice I did wonder if Alessandrini was making a little too much of tempo contrasts (‘O primavera’ is an example), but such doubts are rapidly banished within the context of such exceptionally musical performances.

Brian Robins        

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Recording

Music is the Cure

La Ninfea's Musical Medicine Chest

Or La Ninfea’s Musical Medicine Chest
Minko Ludwig tenor, La Ninfea
67:10
Perfect Noise PN1904

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Music by Henry Purcell, Anthony Holborne, Giles Farnaby, Lully, Marais, Charpentier and Tobias Hume is linked here by traditional tunes and improvised divisions in a regular chemist’s shop of sickness and cures. La Ninfea have trawled far and wide through the music of the Renaissance and the early Baroque to find pieces with medical resonances and have come up with a pleasing programme on their theme, which includes some familiar and unfamiliar songs and instrumental music, ranging from the predictable Purcell glees to unanticipated dips into French Baroque opera. There is an engaging contemplative quality about their accounts here, particularly in the very free divisions, which almost take on the ambience of improvisatory jazz. The playing is generally very convincing, and the blend between the instruments and with the voice pleasant and persuasive. I like the way the improvisatory quality of the divisions seems to spill over and pervade all of the tracks. The dance movements have an involving swing to them, while the performers seem to enjoy exploring the textural potential of their instruments.

D. James Ross

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DVD

They that in ships unto the sea go down

Music for the Mayflower
Passamezzo
61:23
resonus RES10263

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This programme has been drawn together to mark the 400th anniversary of the sailing of the Mayflower, and is based enterprisingly on music taken in part from music books thought to have been taken to America by the pilgrims and to have been used by them in the early days of the colonies. Perhaps predictably for a group of puritans, books of psalms feature heavily, and Henry Ainsworth’s 1612 Book of Psalmes Englished both in Prose and Metre and Richard Allison’s The Psalmes of David in Meter, the former recording just the psalm tunes by way of music, the latter featuring settings ‘for fowre voyces’, both provide material for the programme. Fortunately for the colonists (and for us), a third book, The golden garland of princely pleasures compiled by Richard Johnson provides slightly more racy secular material, in the form of lyrics and sonnets about England’s historical Queens and Kings. The balance of the programme is made up by carefully chosen songs from the period referencing sea travel and the colonial experience. The choice of material is intriguing and revelatory, and it is easy to imagine the pilgrim fathers gathered on deck in quieter moments during their epic voyage joining in song, or later taking a break from the arduous task of building their colonial towns with some communal singing. The singers and instrumentalists of Passamezzo steer a cautious line between ‘refined’ and ‘naïve’ performance style – I could only wish that they might have taken account of the considerable body of scholarship devoted to the pronunciation of 17th-century English, both in ‘old’ and New England. This is particularly noticeable in the contribution from actor Richard de Winter, which would surely have benefited from a nice 17th-century New England twang! Having said that, the singing is always pleasing, the scoring imaginative and plausible and the playing consistently sympathetic. This is a very enjoyable CD and a suitably evocative celebration of a seminal historical moment.

D. James Ross

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Book Festival-conference

Sara Levy’s World: Gender, Judaism and the Bach Tradition in Enlightenment Berlin

Sarah Levy's World: Gender, Judaism and the Bach Tradition in Enlightenment Berlin

Eastman Studies in Music 145
Edited by Rebecca Cypess and Nancy Sinkoff
302pp. ISBN 978-1-58046-921-0 £80
University of Rochester Press, 2018.

This book is the outcome of a symposium in 2014 at Rutgers University. Eleven chapters, packed with information and extensive notes, attest to one of the cornerstones of musicological research: learned contributors excavate, analyse and explicate figures hidden from history.

Here the subject is Sara Levy (nee Itzig, as she signed herself in some of her few surviving letters). Madame Sara Levy (1761- 1854) was Felix Mendelssohn’s (he of the historic1829 performance of J. S. Bach’s St Matthew Passion) great-aunt. She died aged 94, had no children, and is a fascinating and significant figure for two reasons.

The first reason is musical. Levy was a friend and patron of the Bach family. She was a skilled harpsichordist, taught by W. F. Bach, and performed privately and publicly into her 70s – Charles Burney apparently heard her play. Her banker husband played the flute (alright for some), and they commissioned music from C.P.E. Bach. She had a remarkable collection of autographed music manuscripts and prints of the works of the Bach family, which she donated to the Sing-Akademie in Berlin (there is a photo of the house in the book). The collection disappeared, and was – finally – discovered, largely intact, in Kiev, in the Ukraine, in 1999.

Till then, Sara Levy was virtually unknown, However, Peter Wollny, director of the Leipzig Bach-Archiv, published a book about her in 2010 (in German, as yet untranslated, as far as I know). He is also responsible for the Grove entry on her.

Sara Levy was a significant figure for another reason. She was one of the salonnieres in the 18th-early19th centuries in Berlin. These salons were gatherings of friends, family and acquaintances, and they were cultural as well as social events: there might be discussions about books or politics, play-readings, and, of course, music. The salons were generally hosted by women, who were thus able to take part domestically in cultural activities from which they were excluded in the public sphere.

The added dimension to this part of musical/social history is that Sara Levy was one of an elite group of Jewish salonnieres in Berlin. Thus, as more than one chapter points out, she was part of a community of Prussian Jews who were involved in shared cultural activities with Christians – activities which straddle the two concepts of ‘emancipation’ and ‘assimilation’, in the process, as one of the chapters puts it, ‘of becoming modern Europeans’.

However, these oases of cultural coexistence should not be idealised. While there were conversions and intermarriage, there was also fierce controversy. Some of Sara Levy’s family became Protestants, but she remained steadfastly Jewish, though there is no evidence as to whether she was observant. She was involved in Jewish organisations, subscribed to the publication of Hebrew books and supported Jewish and Hebrew education.

At the same time, ‘she embraced Christian elements from German and European culture’. However, while some Jews ‘acquired a taste for church music’, and even had Christmas trees, ‘she and other Jewish women’s musical training (was) through Bach’s instrumental music’, rather than through compositions with Christian religious texts. Women were banned at the time from participating in Catholic and Protestant liturgical music.

It is clear that there were cultural tensions in operation, intertwined with the co-operations. Perhaps one of the most telling examples is the case of Mendelssohn himself. Baptised aged seven into the Protestant faith, at the age of twenty he was responsible for the revivalist performance in 1829 of J.S. Bach’s St Matthew Passion, the story of the passion of Christ as king and Messiah, a challenge to Jewish theology. Contradiction and co-existence in a single piece of music. This historical period marked, as so many others have, arguments for Jewish tolerance alongside anti-semitism.

The book is fascinating, since, in the absence of autobiographical writings and other evidence, Sara Levy and her world are presented through an interdisciplinary perspective. It would have been great to have more information and gossip: was Sara present at the 1829 Passion? Did she know how Mendelssohn got the music in the first place? We will just have to imagine.

Towards the end of the book, an essay aims to clinch the cross-cultural argument by referring to the number of duets for various instruments in Sara Levy’s collection – including nine duets by Telemann which do not appear attributed anywhere else. These duets, it is argued, show that, in the equal balance of voices consists the metaphor through which an analogy and model for cultural co-operation is sealed. In turn, concepts of counterpoint and imitation, drawn from music, become metaphors for conversations between cultures. The images are elegant, anthropomorphic and musicomorphic (to coin a term).

While they function as an attempt to elide cultural and religious tensions, the book, in its carefully researched detail and variety of approaches, shows its subject, Sara Levy, as a social exception who serves to prove the musical rule, that women in music were rarely seen or heard. In this case, she is retrieved as having a crucial role in helping to generate, preserve and revive, the music written by the Bach family (all men, in case the point needs to be made!).

Michelene Wandor

 

 

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Book

Palestrina for All : Unwrapping, singing, celebrating

Jonathan Boswell's book on Palestrina

Jonathan Boswell
ISBN 9781721-968954

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This volume, self-published by the author, and produced and distributed by eBook Partnership is intended to address a perceived gap in the market for an accessible introduction to Palestrina and his music for the non-specialist reader – the title hints at this, and the information on the back of the publication spells it out in further detail, suggesting that it will be ‘welcomed by early music fans, choral singers and church musicians, and by thoughtful, imaginative music lovers.’

I may not be in the front line of Mr Boswell’s target audience, so I have tried to approach his publication with an open mind and with an eye on his intended public. In his opening chapter, the author helpfully lays out his plan campaign, as well as hinting at his methodology. Presumably in deference to his target audience, he states that he will ‘avoid too many technical terms’, and in a general chapter plan he promises an account of Palestrina’s career and life story as well as a treatment of aspects of the composer’s style and more detailed analysis of the Mass settings.

When I got down to reading the text itself, it seemed that the author was all too willing to depart from his promised structure, with bits of biography bleeding into sections of analysis and vice versa. I found the sections on Palestrina’s life and the context of his career the most interesting, and there were occasional genuine insights into how the intellectual fashions of the time would have influenced his music. Too often, though, there were sweeping general statements, which were simply inaccurate. The assertion at the opening of chapter 8 that Palestrina’s music was largely ‘in limbo’ for three centuries is just nonsense – it influenced composers throughout this period, and of all the Renaissance composers Palestrina was the one whose polyphony continued to be sung and copied and imitated until he was joined by his contemporaries in the great 20th-century rediscovery. Too often such sweeping statements of dubious accuracy stand in for genuine fact-based analysis – is this the inevitable result of the author’s aspiration to popularise his subject matter?

To look in more detail at the text, already in this introductory chapter, I encountered an aspect of the author’s writing style, which I found to be an issue throughout the rest of the book. Mr Boswell is prone to express himself in rather opaque turns of phrase. I could cite numerous examples of sentences, which I had to reread several times and some of which I am not sure I ever got to the bottom of. It is only fair that I should give some representative examples :

In the opening paragraph of the book we have –

‘A highly eventful reception and discussion history followed, focussing among inexorable and perennial issues about music, its cultural influence and complex meanings.’

In chapter 4 we have –

‘There is a marked contrast with styles which disclose a large-scale purposive design where everything seems to develop according to a virtuosic master plan.’

Towards the end of the book we have –

‘Palestrina’s counterpoint follows a different path. The texts are centre-of-attention, not woven into enveloping musical structures, however beautiful. Bald description and pure repetition are avoided.’

I have limited myself to three examples, and could, of course, be accused of taking phrases out of context, but in all honesty, context did not clarify any of these statements for me, nor the many other obscure sentences and phrases throughout the book. Many passages read like a bad translation from a foreign language, but as far as I can ascertain English is the author’s first language. I puzzled long and hard about why I found the author’s style so regularly impenetrable, and think it is principally due to two things. Firstly, this is a book, which was in urgent need of a hands-on editor to ask the vital question, ‘Just what do you mean by that?’ (Such an editor would also incidentally have picked up on some of the many typographical shortcomings.) Secondly, I think it is impossible to analyse contrapuntal music in the degree of detail to which the author aspires without the technical terminology he has consciously denied himself – as a result, I think he is often simply inventing his own technical terminology, which frequently means nothing to anybody except himself.

One example would be the term ‘lead’, sometimes expressed as ‘melodic lead’. This would appear to be the author’s term for the cantus firmus, but not always, and sometimes bafflingly he also uses the term cantus firmus, or rather fermus (sic). This sort of mess seems to me inevitable if you deny yourself recourse to technical terms, but then aspire to analyse without them.

The analysis, particularly of the selected mass movements, aspires to musicology, but again without the technical terms to express the main concepts the author seems to engage in the most eccentric fields of analysis. There are several tables recording aspects of Palestrina’s Masses, which seem entirely without relevance. One table expresses the redeployment frequencies of voice parts. Even after reading the surrounding text several times, I am not entirely clear what this even means, let alone why anybody would be interested in these statistics. Is he talking about the density of the polyphony? I really don’t know. More immediately comprehensible, but equally irrelevant is the table laying out the percentage of bars sung by each voice in 12 Kyrie sections, while the statistical analyses of ‘developments of melodic leads’ and the proportions of settings which open with specific voice parts also seem like analysis gone rogue.

So to return to my original mission, has the author made Palestrina’s music more accessible to a general audience? I think that a general reader would struggle as much as I did with Mr Boswell’s eccentric turn of phrase, perhaps even more so without the framework of technical terminology to fall back upon. Would a general reader have any more use than I had for the statistical tables, addressing apparently irrelevant aspects of the composer’s music? Almost definitely not. As I have already suggested, the biographical sections of the book are generally accurate, while their factual nature helps avoids them being infelicitously expressed, so they would probably provide a useful context for anyone listening to Palestrina’s music. However, it has to be said that it is not as easy as the introduction suggests to fillet this information out of the rest of the text. And of course, in the days of Wikipedia, most of the generally agreed biographical material is available online, where it can also be updated. More worryingly, a non-specialist reader would come away from the text with a number of serious misconceptions – that certain passages in Palestrina are badly written, when in fact the author for some reason just doesn’t like them, or indeed that Palestrina’s vocal lines lie comfortably for singers. Try telling that to your amateur tenor section! I will concede that Mr Boswell may be right in identifying the need for an accessible text to support the general listener to or singer of Palestrina’s music, but in all honesty this isn’t it.

D. James Ross

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Recording

Steffani: A son très humble service

CD cover Steffani duets for Hannover

Duets for Sophie Charlotte of Hanover
Various singers and continuo, Jory Vinikour (hpd), dir
89:22
musica omnia mo0802 (2 CDs)

The words in the heading are taken from the dedication made in 1702 by Agostino Steffani to Queen Sophie Charlotte in Berlin in a letter accompanying two volumes of his chamber duets. Exceptionally cultured and herself a singer and keyboard player sufficiently accomplished to take the role of continuo harpsichordist in Giovanni Battista Bononcini’s Polifemo, produced at court in the same year, Sophie Charlotte had been acquainted with Steffani for many years. The unusually close relationship between the two, fully discussed in the exceptionally detailed booklet notes by Steffani scholar Colin Timms and probably facilitated by the fact that the ubiquitously talented Steffani was also a diplomat, is evidenced in a number of surviving letters.

The duets are scored for a variety of vocal combinations. Unlike the alternation of recitative and aria familiar from the slightly later chamber duets of Scarlatti and Handel, they take a variety of flexible forms, all through-composed. Often the structure will consist of some kind of ritornello or rondeau scheme, sometimes, as in ‘Ah che l’ho sempre detto’ for soprano and tenor, returning at the end to the brief opening da capo aria to complete a cyclical form. This incidentally is one of several instances where the text printed in the booklet does not make clear what is repeated. In their fluidity of form, the duets bear a relationship to both earlier 17th century opera and the later madrigal. The latter are also at times evoked by the frequent use of dissonance and chromaticism in vocal writing that is always cajoling the voices into obedient imitation or closely intertwined counterpoint. That of course is appropriate for texts that invariably deal with the vicissitudes of love in either serious or playful mood. Unique among the eleven duets recorded here is the touching final duet, ‘Io mi parto, o cara vita’, scored for soprano and tenor and cast in dialogue form between two lovers on parting. The overall quality of the duets is extremely high, some, such as ‘Pria ch’io faccia altrui palese’ for two sopranos, being sensuously lovely.

Emanating from the US, the set is a follow up to an earlier collection under the direction of harpsichordist Jory Vinikour that I reviewed previously for EMR. There are several differences in the vocal line-up, only Canadian soprano Andréanne Brisson Paquin and bass Mischa Bouvier being common to both recordings. There is now a second soprano, Sherezade Panthaki, who combines most effectively with Paquin in three duets. Reginald L. Mobley, a stylish countertenor and Scott J. Brunscheen’s light lyric tenor complete the roster. Despite these changes, the performances remain very much on a par with those on the earlier CD. That is to say they are all pleasingly sung, though ornaments are often poorly articulated and there are too few of them, without the singers ever suggesting that they have found anything in the text to engage them. True the texts (one of which is by Sophie Charlotte) are all conceits, often, in keeping with the end of the 17th century, pastoral in nature, but we are told over and over again in vocal treatises of the period that realisation of the text is paramount. Highly emotional words such as ‘lasciami’ and ‘tradirà’ must evoke vocal acting if the duets are to come fully to life and move the listener. Here that hardly ever happens. The continuo accompaniment is capable if a little unimaginative, which has the advantage of not detracting from the singers.

These performances are so well-intentioned that I would love to give them higher praise. The fact is however that this is music that is deceptively simple, needing as it does art that transcends artifice.

Brian Robins

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Recording

Charpentier: Messe à quatre chœurs

CD cover Charpentier Messe a quatres chœurs

Carnets de voyage d’Italie
Ensemble Correspondances, Sébastien Daucé
TT
hamonia mundi HMM902640

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This programme is one of those ‘the composer may have visited here, heard music like this and then written this’ concepts, in this case credible and not pushed too hard in Graham Sadler’s fluent note. Most of the music (roughly two thirds) of the music is Italian and excellent it is too, in both content and execution, so full marks to whoever did the painstaking research this kind of thing requires. Cavalli’s Sonata is the stand-out for me, but very much as a primus inter pares. Charpentier is represented by extremes – a motet for three unaccompanied voices (SSA) and his mass for four choirs. This is sonically splendid with rich antiphonal effects, though the tutti sections have choirs doubling each other so the number of simultaneous independent parts is never more than seven. My preference is always for masses to interspersed with other music and not treated like later symphonies (we do not even get the organ interludes Charpentier requests), but that aside this release is very strongly recommended for both content and performances, which are stylish and expressive but never self-indulgent.

David Hansell

This is one of two releases I have reviewed as downloads this month. As such it is not possible to comment in the usual way on the overall physical presentation of the package but a few comments on the download experience are appropriate. This is no longer a novelty, of course, and the process for both the music and the booklet is perfectly straightforward. However, any printing of the booklet material needs care and may need a few experiments with single pages to find the optimum settings for both size and format. In particular beware of pages that are black with white print (a bad design idea anyway) and you may not want to print pages that are not in your language or which contain material of only passing interest. And do not assume that all publications from the same source will work in the same way! Once you get there you will find an excellent programme note (French, English and German), but the sung Latin texts are translated into French only.

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Recording

Charpentier: Méditations pour le Carême

CD cover of Les Surprises Charpentier Pour le Carême

Ensemble Les Surprises, Louis-Noël Bestion de Camboulas
59:49
Ambronay AMY056

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Charpentier’s cycle of Lenten meditations, some of which are dramatised biblical scenes, are preserved only in Sébastien de Brossard’s manuscript collection. Brossard himself described the music as ‘excellent’ and he wasn’t wrong! Charpentier’s melodic and contrapuntal skills are present in abundance, and are enriched by moments of harmonic asperity which still startle even post-Wagner ears.

The scoring is for male voice trio with continuo and I do admire the way in which the singers switch from dramatic characterisation to more ‘objective’ meditation and/or narration while maintaining the balance of the ensemble, phrase shapes and so on. I am less convinced by the approach to the continuo. I do not enjoy, nor do I think historically likely, the changing sonorities within a motet, still less omitting the continuo entirely even though the composer wrote the part. I also doubt the use of a harpsichord in sacred repertoire.

Also in the programme are two fine motets by Brossard and beautifully played instrumental pieces by de Visée and Marais, though over-fiddly continuo disposition distracts from the fine melodic line in the latter.

The booklet (French and English) covers all the bases.

David Hansell