Tag: Vocal music

Categories
Recording

Virtù e Amore

CD cover Virtù e Amore Sinfonie and Arias from the late Baroque

Sinfonie and Arias from the late Baroque
Inés Lorans, Orchestra de Camera ‘Benedetto Marcello’, Mauricio Colasanti
53:02
Tactus TC 690003

This live recording of a recital of music by Porpora, Vivaldi, Handel, Tessarini, Jommelli and Araja features the voice of Franco-Spanish soprano Inés Lorans accompanied by the chamber orchestra ‘Benedetto Marcello’. Lorans is technically assured and has a pleasingly animated approach to the music, with some spectacular and deftly managed ornamentation as in her imaginative decoration of Tornami a vagheggiar from Handel’s Alcina. She sings some of the most celebrated arias of the period including the timeless Lascia ch’io pianga from Handel’s Rinaldo. In this, the orchestral forces are sympathetic and supportive, although elsewhere there is a slight feeling of ‘phoning it in’ from the ensemble, while intonation isn’t always entirely convincing – this is a live recording so perhaps there can be some excuse for the latter but certainly not the former. The Overture de La Stravaganza by the unfamiliar Carlo Tessarini fails to live up to its billing as demonstrating ‘musical creativeness, which never repeats itself’ – in this short example, creativity is in short supply, while repetition seems the order of the day. In short, this recording is a very mixed bag, and – in the highly competitive world of Baroque string playing – these lackadaisical performances just don’t cut it for me. This is a pity, as I think in different company and with a more consistently high-quality choice of repertoire the vocalist Inés Lorans would be much more convincing.

D. James Ross

Categories
Recording

Baroque Arabesque

CD cover Baroque Arabesque

Fiori Musicali Austria
62:19
Gramola 99279

‘With this album Baroque Arabesque the ensemble Fiori Musicali Austria invites a variety of thought-experiments’ – I open my review with a sentence from the programme note as it perfectly sums up what this CD is aiming to achieve. At a time of mass migration, the musicians are conjecturing about cultural interactions in earlier centuries. They alternate tracks of Sephardic folk music and other traditional music with eastern elements with mainstream western Baroque music by composers such as Caccini, Athanasius Kircher, Handel, Tomaso Vitali and Couperin. So far so good, but actually if they had left it at this, the obvious contrast between the two idioms is considerable – this is where the thought-experimenting comes in. The group’s percussionist, who plays a seminal role in the traditional music, is let loose on the Baroque music, ‘Arabesquing it up’ in a way which to my mind is entirely implausible. The most extreme example of this is the group’s version of Tornami a vagheggiar from Handel’s Alcina, where a lovely Baroque aria is well and truly put through the mill with oud and percussion additions triggering some alarming responses from the group’s vocalist and other instrumentalists. We can’t of course say categorically that performances of this kind of mainstream Baroque repertoire never took place, but this is surely modern ‘makey-uppy’ performance practice of the most ridiculous kind. I have been consistently critical of lazy attempts to overlay music of one cultural genre with the practices of another – more than once I have felt that the great Jordi Savall has engaged in cross-cultural fantasy at the expense of the music – but this thought experiment is of another order. Shoe-horning oud and ethnic percussion into the self-contained world of Baroque music is at the same time unconvincing and pointless. I do hope that Fiori Musicali Austria spend more of their time engaging honestly with early repertoire, as their performances are not without merit, but sadly this project seems to me a misconceived and fundamentally dishonest waste of everybody’s time.

D. James Ross

Categories
Recording

Navigating Foreign Waters

CD cover Navigating foreign waters

Spanish Baroque & Mexican Folk Music
Maria Cristina Kiehr, Krishnasol Jiménez, Roberto Koch 51:30
Brilliant Classics 96205

This CD arose from the quest of three musicians based in South America to explore the Spanish roots for their folk music. The already distinctive son of much Spanish music in the 16th and 17th centuries underwent further transformation on contact with the Spanish colonies in Mesoamerica, most notably the jarocho music of Mexico. Krishnasol Jiménez plays the famous Stradivarius ‘Sabionari’ guitar of 1679 (beautifully illustrated inside the CD package), while Roberto Koch improvises a bass line on a colascione, a sort of three-stringed bass lute employed in folk music and also known as the liuto della giraffa on account of its long neck! The sound of these two plucked instruments in combination with Maria Cristina Kiehr’s pure and expressive soprano voice is very pleasing. I find it interesting that these musicians from Mexico, Venezuela and Argentina respectively, performing with a genuine New World perspective, take a much more restrained approach to the Mexican idioms than do many Old World musicians. Their performances are often languidly charming rather than spikey with cross-rhythms, although at the same time, I don’t want to make them sound dull – where appropriate they are infectiously toe-tapping. There is even a bit of ‘body-tapping’ of one of the stringed instruments – one would hope of the colascione rather than the venerable guitar. Perhaps it is the participation of this priceless survivor, which dictates the generally respectful approach of the performers. In any case, the performers’ backgrounds and musical experience as well as the instruments they employ give their performances of this repertoire considerable authority, and this minimal ensemble of three performers has a delightful completeness about it.

D. James Ross

Categories
Recording

Reforming Hymns

CD cover Reforming Hymns Musica ficta Bo Holten

Lassus, Maistre, Palestrina, Pederson, Schlick, Senfl, Walter
Musica Ficta, directed by Bo Holten
64:58
Dacapo 8.226142

This CD offers a guided tour through a musical world in transition. With a focus on Denmark, it illustrates the shift from traditional Roman Catholic worship to the Protestant rites which replaced it. The subtleties of this major transition are explored as vernacular texts gradually invade the world of Latin polyphony and chant, polyphony for professional choirs is gradually replaced by more four-square homophonic settings for congregations. Some of the items in the midst of this transition such as Mogens Pederson’s Kyrie / Gud Fader are extraordinarily beautiful and owe much to pre-Reformation music. Radically new is the pressing of secular songs into the service of sacred hymns – pre-Reformation composers had delighted in using secular melodies as cantus firmi, but hymns that were often just sacred contrafacta of secular songs were something entirely new. Often these were intended for solo voice with or without accompaniment, but very soon harmonised versions crept into the repertoire, and composers like Pederson rose to the challenge with lovely settings such as his Fader vor vdi Himmerig recorded here. The new hymn melodies, just like the ore-Reformation chants, were also now used as the basis of polyphonic organ works such as the anonymous Organ Chorale on Vater unser in Himmelreich, played here on a fine early organ of which sadly no details but perhaps in the Trinitatis Kirke, Copenhagen. It is lovely to hear really quite basic settings for the early Reformed church blossom into more complex and involving settings by Pederson, Johann Walter, Lupus Hellinck and Matthaeus le Maistre. I couldn’t help drawing parallels with a similar development in English and Scottish music around the times of their respective Reformations. Particularly illuminating in this recording is the decision to track one particular text such as Maria zart, Christ lag in Todesbanden and others through a number of settings by different composers. This programme, based on research by Bjarke Moe, who also provided the instructive programme note, is constantly fascinating. Add to this the beautifully idiomatic solo and choral singing of Musica Ficta under the experienced and intelligent direction of Bo Holten and the fine organ-playing of Søren Vestegaard and we have a lovely package that both educates and delights.

D. James Ross

Categories
Recording

La Barre: Pour être heureux en amour

CD cover La Barre Pour etre heureux en amour

Claire Lefilliâtre soprano, Luc Bertin-Hugault bass, Les Épopées, directed by Stéphane Fuget
77:06
Ramée RAM 2302

‘The true character of those who love is composed of tenderness and plaintiveness. They possess a languid air […]. All the words of a true lover, even if he is not unhappy, always have a plaintive tone’. Thus the Abbé Charles Cottin in his Œuvres galantes (Paris, 1665). It’s an eloquent description, perhaps rather more appropriate to what we hear on the present disc than its given title – For Happiness in Love.

The songs here belong to the category of airs serieux, works designed for the salons of Paris and which may be seen as a monodic successor to the fundamentally polyphonic air de cour. They are by Joseph Chabanceau de La Barre, a member of a distinguished French musical family active in the 17th century. Like his father Pierre he was an organist of the chapelle royale at Notre Dame in Paris, but otherwise he appears to be a somewhat shadowy figure. His Airs a deux parties avec les second couplets en diminution were published in 1669, the two parts therefore referring not to the vocal disposition, which is mostly intended for solo voice, but to a form in which the second part, or verse is decorated in a manner designed to allow the singer to display his or her technique. It’s a process that will be familiar to anyone that understands the doubles attached to French dances of the Baroque period, double simply meaning variant.

Perhaps the most important point to stress is that though these may be salon songs, they are mostly of the utmost sophistication, calling as they do not only for refined, sensitive elegance, but equally acute sensitivity and interpretative finesse. It is such qualities that are especially in evidence in these performances, which also employ 17th-century pronunciation. Stéphane Fuget is at the forefront of making us more aware of the importance of expressing text in Baroque music, specifically the operas of Monteverdi, having recorded all three of the composer’s extant dramatic works. Soprano Claire Lefilliâtre, who sings most of the airs, is a thoroughly experienced Baroque specialist who has worked extensively with Fuget and here responds to the interpretative demands of the airs to near ideal effect, singing with exactly the kind of freedom they require. Listen, to the declamatory pain she finds in ‘Forêts solitaires et sombres’ (track 2), the desolate cry of the abandoned lover to the emptiness of the forest wilderness. Here, as throughout, Lefilliâtre uses the text as a springboard to discover the eloquence within the music, bending the music to respond through the use of such devices as rubato and portamento. And it is important to stress that these songs need this kind of interpretative input if they are not to emerge as polite salon music belying their texts. In the songs to which he contributes, bass Luc Bertin- Hugault is also highly effective in his interpretative gestures – listen to his portamento in the anguished pain of ‘Ah! je sens que mon coeur’ – even if his slightly grainy voice is not of the most beautiful quality.

Several of the airs are given instrumental performances by the supporting members of Les Épopées (two bass viols, theorbo and harpsichord) while Fuget himself contributes bewitching performances of three keyboard pieces by La Barre on a lovely unidentified instrument. This is an important issue, one that makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the music and interpretation of French secular music of the 17th century.

Brian Robins

Categories
Recording

From Rome to Vilnius

CD cover From Rome to Vilnius

Canto Fiorito, directed by Rodrigo Calveyra
51:02
Brilliant Classics 97227

This attractive CD is based on sacred and secular music, which is featured in the Sapieha album of music associated with the Vasa Court in Vilnius. The composers were mainly Roman, but many had served at one time or another as Kapellmeister to Sigismund III in Poland and Vilnius. The list of composers includes the familiar and the unfamiliar: Annibale Stabile, Asprillio Pacelli, Giovanni Anerio, Marco Scacchi, Barthomiej Pekiel, Diomedes Cato, Tarquinio Merula and Francesco Rognoni. The repertoire ranges from large-scale sacred settings for voices and instruments to small sets of instrumental variations. The playing and singing of Canto Fiorito is of a very high standard, while the recording venue – appropriately the Palace of the Grand Dukes of Lithuania in Vilnius – provides a rich full acoustic to allow the music to bloom. The group’s director has reconstructed a missing bass part for Merula’s Benedicta tu allowing it to be recorded here for the first time. This varied programme reflects the cultural richness of the Baltic states at the end of the 16th century and during the first part of the 17th century. Based in Vilnius, this fine consort is symptomatic of the flourishing early music scene in Eastern Europe.

D. James Ross

 

Categories
Recording

Christoph Graupner: Christ lag in Todesbanden

CD Cover Graupner Christ lag in Todesbanden

Complete Cantatas for two sopranos and bass
Marie Luise Werneburg, Hanna Zumsande, Dominik Wörner, Kirchheimer BachConsort, directed by Florian Heyerick
78:43
cpo 555 557-2

Best known to history as one of the many failed applicants for the job of Thomaskantor in Leipzig when Bach secured the post, he first came to my attention as the composer of some of the earliest concertos for chalumeaux. The fact that Graupner spent fifty years composing for the court in Darmstadt meant that most of his compositions are on the modest scale befitting a court chapel – one of the main reasons he failed to secure the Leipzig job – while he was largely overlooked by ensuing generations. These cantatas for two sopranos and bass voices with strings and occasionally wind, although sadly not chalumeaux, are charming compositions making imaginative use of their limited forces. The singers on this CD seem to be enjoying Graupner’s idiomatic vocal turn of phrase, and respond intelligently and musically to his innate sense of drama. The strings and wind play one to a part, allowing for an admirable clarity and reflecting the likely custom in the modest context of Darmstadt. Graupner was only J S Bach’s senior by two years, but their music is very different indeed, and this attractive CD of Graupner’s church music underlines the variety of styles employed by German composers at the time. It is interesting to think how a lifetime composing church music in Darmstadt contributed to Graupner’s very sure compositional hand and rich musical vocabulary, and also allows us to engage in some gratuitous what-ifs had the decision of the Thomaskirche committee gone in another direction.

D. James Ross

Categories
Recording

Chansons musicales, Paris 1533

CD cover Chansons musicales, Paris 1533

Zephyrus Flutes led by Nancy Hadden
58:56
crd 3548

The 50th anniversary of the crd label provides the perfect reason for the rerelease of this 2013 recording by flautist Nancy Hadden and her consort, Zephyrus Flutes. The most groundbreaking aspect of this performance is the fact that it presents a lovely selection of Renaissance French chansons played on a consort of Renaissance flutes or alternatively played on solo flute with lute accompaniment, or consort with lute interspersed with music for solo lute. Where we might be more accustomed to hearing this repertoire played on a consort of recorders, the sound of three Renaissance tenor flutes and a bass flute is strikingly different in texture and timbre, which when I originally reviewed this CD I found instantly attractive. The solo flute playing is beautifully nuanced, while the consort with and without lute achieves a lovely blend. The group’s lutanist, none other than Jacob Heringman, adds his own customary musicality and technical virtuosity to this selection. The repertoire is drawn from Pierre Attaignant’s Chansons Musicales of 1533 in editions for flute consort by Nancy Hadden, while the lute solos are from roughly contemporary collections by Francesco da Milano, Pierre Phalèse, Hans Newsiedler and Vincenzo Galilei. Neither flautists nor lutanist are happy with obvious repertoire, and they all range far and wide through their chosen sources in search of the less familiar. I remember being struck ten years ago by how accessible this repertoire is and the sound of flutes and lute combined has stuck very firmly in my memory. I am not aware of this CD having a lasting legacy in the form of the formation of rival flute consorts, but it is lovely and thought-provoking to have it re-released in 2024.

D. James Ross

Categories
Recording

Kauffmann: Complete Sacred Works

CD cover Kauffmann Complete Sacred Works

Isabel Schicketanz, Elizabeth Mücksch, Britta Schwarz, Tobias Hunger, Christoph Pfaller, Tobias Bendt SSATTB, Collegium Vocale Leipzig, Merseburger Hofmusik, Michael Schönheit
106:34 (2 CDs in a box)
cpo 555 365-2

A slightly older contemporary of J S Bach and Handel, Georg Friedrich Kauffmann has passed under the radar for a number of reasons, being born, living and dying in relative obscurity. Four decades spent composing for the court and chapel in Merseburg must have resulted in many more sacred pieces than have survived, all of which appear on this 2CD set. To compound Kauffmann’s ill fortune, several boxes of his music were sent to Dresden, where they were subsequently consumed by the firestorm which destroyed much of the city towards the end of WWII. One tantalising what-if in Kauffmann’s career was his application for the post of Thomaskantor in nearby Leipzig. If the committee preferred the slightly younger J S Bach, it seems a little unfair that Kauffmann has suffered from this comparison with the great Bach ever since. The present recording has mustered excellent forces from Merseburg and Leipzig to present highly impressive accounts of Kauffmann’s surviving oeuvre, opening with an undoubted masterpiece, the oratorio ‘Rüstet euch, ihr Himmelschören’ for six soloists, four-part choir and a large orchestra with trumpets and drums. This piece, surely not the only such piece he wrote, but sadly the only one to survive, speaks to the resources of the Saxe-Merseburg court but also to the inventiveness and imagination of the composer in his deft handling of these lavish forces. Equally adept in his handling of the large vocal and instrumental forces is the director of these performances Michael Schönheit. He and his impressive line-up of musicians are not content to produce a big sound, but provide wonderfully nuanced accounts of Kauffmann’s music. Expressive solo singing and beautifully defined choral contributions are effectively complemented with precise and musical instrumental support. The rest of the two CDs is devoted to Kauffmann’s surviving cantatas, again surely a tiny remnant of what must have once existed. Certainly, the composer’s facility with this form suggests considerable experience, and these surviving works range in scale from solo cantatas to one which matches the oratorio. Having heard some of Kauffmann’s sacred music serving as concert and CD ‘fillers’, the present collection featuring his entire body of sacred music and in first-class performances serves to shine a spotlight on this neglected master and allows his music to shine in its own right.

D. James Ross

Categories
Recording

Vivaldi: Musica sacra per coro e orchestra I

CD cover VIVALDI – MUSICA SACRA PER CORO E ORCHESTRA I

Soloists, Coro e Orchestra Ghislieri, conducted by Giulio Prandi
 73:01
Naïve OP8564

The mammoth undertaking that is the Vivaldi Edition moves on to another series within the series, this time devoted to sacred choral music. In this case, that is a bit of a misnomer given that the present CD includes three works that do not feature a chorus. While some elements of the Edition are unique documents – the complete operas particularly come to mind – intégrales of the sacred works have been undertaken previously by Philips and Hyperion. However, even on the first disc, there are two works that were not included in either of the earlier sets simply because they are recent discoveries. In a customarily scholarly note, Vivaldi expert Michael Talbot describes the Dixit Dominus, RV 807 as ‘the largest and most important new sacred work by the composer to have emerged in the last twenty years’. The last of the three settings of the Vespers psalm composed by Vivaldi, Talbot suggests a date of around 1732. He points to the high quality of the work, rightly drawing particular attention to ‘De torrente’, where the mimetic evocation of the constant murmuring of the brook acts as a foundation for the long cantabile lines of the alto soloist, Margherita Maria Sala, described here as a mezzo but more accurately a rich-toned contralto with a timbre not unlike that of the great French alto Lucile Richardot.

Sala also sings the other recently rediscovered work, the motet Vos invito barbaræ faces, RV 811. Scored for solo alto, strings and continuo it consists of two extremely contrasted arias placed either side of a plain recitative and is concluded by the customary bravura Alleluia. The opening is an aria agitata urging battle against the forces of evil, which are compared to wild beasts, while the second gently welcomes the worthwhile wounds sustained in the battle.

Sala also has a prominent role in the Magnificat in G minor, RV 611, a work composed for the Pietà in Venice originally around 1715, but later considerably revised; it is the final version that is recorded here. She is particularly effective in the exquisite ‘Sicut locutus est’, where the long, beautifully sustained cantabile line culminates in a cadential trill, an ornament otherwise sadly lacking. Overall RV 611 is a work fully deserving of its place as one of Vivaldi’s most popular sacred work. From the chromatically-inflected opening chorus through the exuberant and well-executed soprano solo ‘Et exultavit’ and the succeeding ‘Quia respexit’, also a soprano solo, the work exudes a heart-warming expression of humility.

It’s a quality that fits well with Giulio Prandi’s approach to this music, his performances particularly notable for their warm affection and the space he is prepared to allow the music, a welcome change from the driving rhythmic impetus and virtuosity so often sought by conductors in this repertoire. Of the works not so far mentioned, Sanctorum meritis, RV 620 is a hymn, alternate verses being set, it being assumed that the intervening verses were intoned by the priest. It is sung here by soprano Carlotta Colombo (not the alto, as claimed by Talbot), whose fresh, youthful-sounding voice and agile technique are a pleasure throughout, though on this evidence she needs to improve her articulation of ornaments. Confitebor tibi, Domine, RV 596, a setting of the Vespers Psalm 110, is unique among Vivaldi’s sacred works in being the only one scored for a trio of solo voices, here alto, tenor and bass, its main interest coming from the contrapuntal interweaving of the three soloists.

This is an excellent start to coverage of the sacred works, a mini-series to which I imagine that Prandi and his accomplished forces will contribute a major role.

Brian Robins