This musical journey is ravishing and revelatory
Kate Bolton-porciatti delights in this collection of 17th-century works inspired by Italian travels
An Italian Travel Diary
M-A Charpentier: Mass for Four Choirs, etc; plus works by Benevoli, Beretta, Cavalli, Cazzati, Giamberti and Merula Ensemble Correspondances/sébastian Daucé Harmonia Mundi HMM 902640 74:45 mins ‘Go to Italy; that is the true source’ – so Charpentier advised following his own journey from Paris to Rome in the 1660s. This ‘travel diary’ brings together the sort of music he may have encountered en route and provides a narrative thread for a selection of ravishing, often revelatory, works.
Highlights include Maurizio Cazzati’s sumptuous eight-voice motet Salve caput sacrosanctum; Cavalli’s 12-part Sonata in D minor, showcasing the ensemble’s crack instrumentalists, and Merula’s quasi-operatic psalm-setting Credidi propter quod. The disc’s centrepiece is Cavalli’s Magnificat of 1656 – a vivid, dramatic, daringly sensual response to the canticle text. Director Sébastien Daucé throws into high relief its textural and expressive contrasts – magnificent and intimate by turns; ‘Deposuit potentes’, uttered with hushed reverence, is particularly beautiful.
Charpentier lingered for some years in Rome, and the city’s extravagant polychoral tradition clearly left its mark. He was later inspired to prepare a manuscript of Francesco Beretta’s 16-part Missa Mirabiles elationes maris, to which his own, lush 16-part Mass clearly responds. The Roman composer weaves a shroud of sound, threaded with yearning dissonances, creating a profoundly poignant work. Here, and throughout the disc, Daucé gives expressive shape to the music’s ebb and flow; tempos are beautifully judged, responding to the texts and their sacred context. The ensemble’s luminous vocal sound and instrumental colours add to the lush sonic canvas.
In short, this is an inspiring programme which highlights the reasons why Italy had such an overwhelming impact on the impressionable young Parisian.
PERFORMANCE ★★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★★
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Bruckner
Latin Motets
Latvian Radio Choir/sigvards Klava Ondine ODE 1362-2 56:38 mins Anton Bruckner devoted his life and his music ‘to the dear God’, the words he inscribed on the title page of his Ninth Symphony. But all his work, with insignificant exceptions, is dedicated to God, even though He gave the composer a particularly rough time. Worse, perhaps, than anything else was a hopeless lack of confidence, which led Bruckner to indulge in incessant revisions of his works. It was the symphonies that caused him most anxiety, but his choral works weren’t altogether untouched by it. However, most of the works on this excellent disc were written early, even in his teens, and rather than revising he would write a new piece, often to the same words. It probably helped that they were written to be performed in a liturgical context, and in Bruckner’s favourite churches.
None of these pieces is less than radiant, but most of them are also very short, two or three minutes. The longest piece is the first Mass in D minor, though it lacks the Credo and some other parts. Listening to this disc straight through is not recommended; the pieces begin to merge. That is no fault of the admirable Latvian Radio Choir, nor of their director Sigvards Klava. I prefer them to Cambridge’s King’s College Choir, who sound as if they are trying to be angels, while this Latvian choir resounds from the bottom upwards and does sound much more like an anxious congregation praying.
Michael Tanner
PERFORMANCE ★★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★
Daucé gives expressive shape to the music’s ebb and f low
Machaut
The Lion of Nobility:
Ballades, Motets, etc
The Orlando Consort
Hyperion CDA68318 58:57 mins Renowned in his own lifetime as the pre-eminent poet-composer of his day, Guillaume de Machaut (c1300-77) took special care for the preservation of his
output, having his collected works copied into a series of lavish presentation manuscripts – the vocal contents of which the Orlando Consort have been steadily recording for Hyperion since 2012. However, their approach is rather different from the refined blend of such pioneering groups as Gothic Voices; exploiting, instead, the contrasts in timbre and character between the four voices and varying in manner from rough to smooth depending upon the texts and genres of different pieces.
The most celebrated item in this latest collection is the rondeau for three voices Ma fin est mon commencement in which the principal melody is heard in counterpoint with itself sung backwards while the lowest line reverses itself halfway through.
The most demanding listen is the 18-minute lai En demantant et lamentante, in which four paragraphs of polyphony are each repeated three times with different voices emphasised. The most exciting is the final motet Tant doucement m’ont attrait in which, over a slow bass line, the top parts challenge and dodge one another at the double.
Bayan Northcott
PERFORMANCE ★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★
Schubert
Die schöne Müllerin Ian Bostridge (tenor), Saskia Giorgini (piano) Pentatone PTC 5186 775 61:17 mins Tenor Ian Bostridge and Die schöne Müllerin have form. A quarter of a century ago pianist Graham Johnson chose him for the cycle as part of Hyperion’s complete Schubert song odyssey. Less than a decade on followed another recording with Mitsuko Uchida; and now comes this third, recorded live at Wigmore Hall with Salzburg Mozart Competition winner Saskia Giorgini. The inevitable change in timbre over the years is striking; and when Bostridge argues that the cycle is more than a ‘rustic pastoral confection of adolescent lovemongering’, whilst undeniably true, he’s also justifying a voice darker, less readily manoeuvrable and no longer in the first flush of youth. Innocence yields to experience so that even the first song seems tinged with a premonition of the painful trajectory that will lead to the watery embrace of the brook.
‘Das Wandern’ underlays delight with the almost-menace of some unbiddable imperative. What follows isn’t so much an initially wide-eyed voyage of discovery into love, loss and despair, but a series of flashbacks refracted through the prism of a knowledge hardwon. It’s a valid approach, typical of Bostridge’s always-inquisitive psychological antennae; and how deliciously arch is the greeting at the beginning of ‘Morgengruss’, or crushingly matter-of-fact the ending of ‘Tränenregen’. ‘Eifersucht und Stolz’ snarls with a desperation that isn’t quite ‘earthed’ in ‘Die liebe Farbe’. But in the frisson of live performance a few technical issues obtrude, while expressiveness sometimes trespasses into caricature. And in the previous recording, under Uchida’s deliquescent fingers, the brook babbles more beguilingly than for Giorgini. Paul Riley
PERFORMANCE ★★★
RECORDING ★★★★
Media Vita; Iudica me Deus; A solis ortus cardine, etc
Choir of New College, Oxford/
Robert Quinney
Linn Records CKD 632 71:58 mins
The 16th-century composer John Sheppard belongs to the generation just before the great figures of Tallis and Byrd. Selections from his Latin works have fairly frequently been recorded, and at least two of them (by Stile Antico on Harmonia Mundi, and the Westminster Cathedral Choir on Hyperion) have the same title as this one – taken from one of Sheppard’s most impressive motets.
There the similarity ends. The New College Choir (16 boys and 14 adults) is quite large but its engagingly fulsome sound is kept nicely in focus by the acoustics of the moderately sized church in which it was recorded. Their rich, warm sound comes across best in A solis ortus cardine and in the superb motet Media Vita of the title – the lower voices are in balance and the boys voices gain brightness from the slightly high performance
pitch. Sometimes the pieces sag a little from lack of direction ( Judice me Deus), and the inner voices occasionally require a little more effort to highlight the points of imitation and keep the rhythms precise in the shorter note values (Confitebor Domine). However, in general this is a vivid and convincing presentation of a very talented composer.
Anthony Pryer
PERFORMANCE ★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★
Credo
Sacred Works by Albinoni, JS Bach, Brahms, Fauré, Mascagni, Mozart, Saint-saëns, Schubert, Stradella, Verdi, etc Marina Rebeka (soprano); Latvian Radio Choir; Sinfonietta Riga/ Modestas Pitr nas
Prima Classic PRIMA 007 75:47 mins The Latvian soprano’s collection is mostly made up of religious items, though the aria ‘Ombra mai fu’ from Handel’s Serse doesn’t qualify, nor Dido’s Lament, let alone Remo Giazotto’s post-war Adagio supposedly based on a fragment by Albinoni, sung as a vocalise. Many pieces are performed in uncredited arrangements while several are misattributed.
But Marina Rebeka makes something worthwhile out of pretty well all of them, her voice forwardly if occasionally fiercely recorded – as in the misattributed Stradella ‘Pietà, signore’ (in fact by Louis Niedermeyer: 1802-61).
She offers a rich, spacious sound in Mozart’s ‘Laudate Dominum’ and carefully gradated tone in Verdi’s Ave Maria. Actually composed by Vladimir Vovikov (1925-73), the regularly misattributed Caccini
Ave Maria is sensitively voiced, Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel’s ‘Bist du bei mir’ (frequently misattributed to Bach) expressive.
The ‘Pie Jesu’ from Fauré’s Requiem is luminously voiced. She deploys a veiled tone for Durante’s ‘Vergin tutto amor’ – originally a vocalise to which the current text was added more than a century after the composer’s death.
There’s a moving ethereality to the soprano solo from the Brahms Requiem, a performance also notable for a fine contribution (as elsewhere on the disc) from the Latvian Radio Choir.
Among the rarer pieces is the attractive Saint-saëns’s Ave Maria (1865). Rebeka enters with conviction into the spirit of its Schubertian namesake, while her delivery of the Mascagni setting (an arrangement of the Intermezzo from Cavalleria rusticana) is equally potent.
Musical standards are presentable under conductor Modestas Pitr nas, with the Sinfonietta Riga leaving a good impression.
George Hall
PERFORMANCE ★★★
RECORDING ★★★★
Handel’s Tea Time
Handel: Venus & Adonis; 24 English Songs, HWV 228 – excerpts; Mi palpita i cor, HWV 132b; Purcell: The Fairy Queen – O Let Me Weep Dorothee Mields (soprano);
Die Freitagsakademie Bern
Sony Classical 19439792732 76:04 mins Baroque ensemble Die Freitagsakademie and star soprano Dorothee Mields have performed together since 2017, but this is their first recording. The wait has been worth it.
Mields is splendid. Her poise, luminous vocalism and animated dialogue with the band show why she’s an Early Music legend. Her command of the recording’s three languages allows her to relish words as well as music, whether goofing around – as in ‘Bacchus’ HWV 228 – or lamenting. Her consistently intelligent musicianship is apparent above all when she improvises according to period and location. The profound reflection she brings to the sacred air ‘Flammende Rose, Zierde der Erden’ is as impressive as the wild peregrinations with which she executes the cantata ‘Mi palpita il cor’. The musicianship of the ensemble’s six players is likewise intense, delicate and alert to rhetoric. Band director Katharina Suske brings to her oboe part a slow-burning lyricism, while the realisations by lutenist Jonathan Rubin make the humblest of progressions richly sonorous.
If I have a complaint, it is with the packaging. The programme is from Mi palpita il cor, an earlier Freitagsakademie concert with Mields, but you’d never know this from the sleeve notes. Why silently rebrand a selection of love-themed songs under such an ill-suited title? The music isn’t all Handel, with Purcell’s ‘O let me weep’ clocking in as the longest single track, nor is it all English. And scholars have shown that a number of pieces said here to be ‘by Handel’ are almost certainly not. We must close our eyes to the misleading branding, and listen: the performers’ artistry speaks for itself. Berta Joncus
PERFORMANCE ★★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★
Verklärte Nacht
Fried: Verklärte Nacht*†; Korngold: Songs of Farewell†; Lehár: Fieber†; Schoenberg: Verklärte Nacht *Christine Rice (soprano), †Stuart Skelton (tenor); BBC Symphony Orchestra/edward Gardner
Chandos CHSA 5243 (CD/SACD)
63:36 mins
The tortured orchestral landscape glowers. A tenor enters, detonating a controlled explosion on the word ‘Licht’. And expressionism yields to a waltzing nod to the world of operetta before touching on Berlioz. Who would have thought that the composer of The Merry Widow had it in him? But Fieber, Lehár’s ‘tone poem for tenor and large orchestra’, isn’t the only rarity in this skilfully woven tapestry charting a voluptuous cross-section of fin de siècle Viennoiserie. Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht is paired with a nearcontemporaneous setting of the Dehmel poem which inspired it by Oskar Fried, a composer-conductor who, in 1921, was the first to record a Mahler symphony. Scored for mezzo, tenor and orchestra, its lush Romanticism falls alluringly on the ear in this seductively authoritative performance, even if Fried never quite interrogates the poem with the tenacity of Schoenberg’s wordless psychodrama.
To finish (picking up the thematic baton from Lehár), there’s Korngold’s Lieder des Abschieds. Composed in the slipstream of Die tote Stadt, the opera’s spirit is revisited in four death-suffused songs – the first a tender lullaby, vividly scored, setting Christina Rossetti. Across the programme Edward Gardner is preternaturally attentive, nailing the volatile blend of schmaltz and suffering that underpins the Lehár; and cloaking the moonbathing opening of the Fried with a velvety sumptuousness that prefigures the ensuing vocal refulgence – though Stuart Skelton, having elsewhere unleashed full Heldentenor heft, sounds momentarily challenged in the highest register. Adventurously conceived, and with the BBC Symphony Orchestra on top form, this is a stimulating disc from first note to last.
Paul Riley
PERFORMANCE ★★★★
RECORDING ★★★★