After several recordings with Anima Eterna and Jos Van Immerseel, the French violinist Chouchane Siranossian tackles a programme of extremely virtuosic concertos that few Baroque violinists dare to face. Thanks to her technical gifts and to partners ideally suited to this repertory – the Venice Baroque Orchestra and its conductor Andrea Marcon, a specialist in the Italian Baroque style – she takes up the challenge with brio. This album is released to coincide with the 250th anniversary of Tartini’s death in 2020. Of special interest is a completely unknown and unpublished concerto in G major, the manuscript of which was recently found by the musicologist Margherita Canale.

2020 offers a good opportunity to take a closer look at Giuseppe Tartini, 250 years after his death. A first-rate virtuoso, he was the violin teacher who most influenced 18th-century style: his pupils, who came to study with him from all over the world, went on to fill the best orchestras in Europe. By crafting melodically and harmonically original language on the violin, he best imitated the human voice by taking inspiration from poetry and its meter and using it as a model for his melodic phrases. Tartini, Corelli’s true descendent, went through various compositional phases by striving to find an absolute and natural style of music, close to the people’s soul. There remain abundant traces of his career in a large collection of letters, second only to Mozart’s correspondence. The general public is perhaps still unaware of the beauty which remains secret: hundreds of his compositions which are yet to be brought to light. This re-release publication accompanies the beginning of an Opera Omnia edition published by Barenreiter beginning in 2020: it is hoped that it may outline the illuminating profile of a great musician of the eighteenth century.

REVIEW:

Enrico Gatti has consulted various sources for the recording of these sonatas. He states that in the case of the slow movements there are no versions with ornaments by Tartini himself. He adds ornaments of his own, but does so in different ways in the two sets of sonatas. In the Op 1 he is more generous in this department than in the Op 2 sonatas, where - as he writes in his liner-notes - Tartini inserted many ornaments in the melodic line. This is an indication of the careful and thought-out approach to the interpretation of these sonatas. Gatti avoids spectacular effects - although certainly not eschewing virtuosity, for instance in his ornamentation - and rather emphasizes the intimate and poetic features of Tartini's music. Therefore this set is of great importance with regard to interpretation of Tartini's sonatas. The reissue of this set of discs is most welcome, and nobody interested in Tartini should miss it. Gatti was a pioneer of historical performance practice in Italy, which in the course of time has become mainstream there as it has north of the Alps. This set of discs is also a tribute to his art and his activities in the revival of baroque music. Here he receives substantial support from two other prominent representatives of the Italian early music scene.

– MusicWeb International

Georges Onslow is best known for a body of chamber music that follows the musical lineage of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. A master of the quintet medium, Onslow offered variations of ensemble to players, the two presented here being cast for string quartet and double bass. The tempestuous Quintet No. 23 in A minor is charged with almost ceaseless nervous energy and Schubertian lyricism; the mature Quintet No.31 in A major is both subtle and elegant, with a brilliant assemblage of details such as walking bass and violin-cello duets.

In this new Chaconne release, Trio Goya offers unique accounts of Beethoven’s early piano trios, revealing on period instruments and in the magical acoustic of the Britten-Pears Auditorium at Aldeburgh’s Snape Maltings the extraordinary range of colors and narratives that these pieces suggest. Beethoven’s Opus 1 features amongst Trio Goya’s central repertoire, played regularly in the UK’s most prestigious venues and beyond. After a recent Wigmore Hall concert, Early Music Today wrote that “Trio Goya sent us home spinning on the delights and laughter of early Beethoven. His piano trio opus 1 No. 1 frothed and bubbled down the finale's theme, the musicians swept along by their own hell-for-leather, immaculately kept tempo.” These pieces mark a kind of beginning in Beethoven’s career. They were indeed planned and executed, over a period of two years, with unprecedented care and skill; they mark the start of a new creative period for the young genius, which is distinct from the younger Bonn years and is fully deserving of the label ‘first maturity’ conferred by the musicologist Lewis Lockwood.

By the time of Emperor Joseph II’s death in 1790 Beethoven was a member of the court musical establishment in Bonn. To mark the occasion, Beethoven was commissioned to write to cantatas, one to mourn Joseph’s death and the other to celebrate the accession to the throne of Emperor Leopold II. Although Beethoven was only 19 years old at the time, both works show the embryonic marks of his greatness: intense expression and control of structure in one, and an almost operatic panache in the other. Neither piece was performed during Beethoven’s lifetime.