Anna Prohaska asked Wolfgang Katschner and the Lautten Compagney at the outset of the coronavirus crisis whether they shouldn’t spontaneously organize a musical get-together in this period. This has now resulted in Redemption. This is a sequence of music selected solely from Bach cantatas, compiled in keeping with the aforenamed conceptual association. Redemption has multiple meanings, for instance: can music give us consolation in times of sickness and crisis; can it open up emotional and contemplative spaces for us; is it redemptive for us as musicians to be the “instruments” in engendering music and therefore spirituality? Besides Anna as soloist and three other singers, Redemption features a larger group of musicians – around twenty instrumentalists. These musicians serve a dual role: they expertly accompany the arias that Anna sings and they also represent the concept of human interaction and a shared collective experience which has been missing during these times.

Joël Grare, percussionist and tireless seeker of offbeat sounds and instruments, here presents his third album for Alpha: ‘Footprints beneath the snow: first sounds of innocence, cowbells and jingle-bells, sounds swallowed up by the mountain’… Through his compositions and inspirational influences, he follows a dizzying emotional Alpine path, along with his amazing instruments: drums, balafon, melodica, sanza, cowbells of all sizes, Japanese drums, trompiki, rainstick, thunder sheet – and his famous ‘clavicloche’. He writes: “One early afternoon in January 1986 I visited the Devouassoud workshop in Chamonix, manufacturer of the jingle bells and tongued cowbells that adorn the animals’ necks, filling the mountainside with their chimes… I added these new treasures to my percussion set, not realizing that these newbies arranged among my cymbals would eventually become an instrument in their own right… Totally unlike church bells, whose pitches are pre-calculated when casting them, the pitch of cowbells is only approximate. The low-pitched bells are called “dull”, and the high-pitched ones “bright” – you need only a few cowbell notes to identify a particular herd. When trying to assemble a full tuned set, you might test several hundred cowbells and pick out just a few… To collect a chromatic set of three-and-a-half octaves took me a good twenty years!”

Here is the third and last instalment in the ‘Live at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées’ series of Mozart operas conducted by Jérémie Rhorer. After Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail and La clemenza di Tito comes Don Giovanni, recorded in 2016. On the occasion of the performances (directed by Stéphane Braunschweig) during which Radio France recorded the present discs, Le Figaro wrote: ‘Jérémie Rhorer expertly conducted his orchestra “Le Cercle de l’Harmonie”. On the stage, Jean-Sébastien Bou sang and acted the title role impeccably. He was seconded by his valet Leporello, superbly played by the Canadian Robert Gleadow. A thrilling production both musically and intellectually.’ The cast is completed by the ardent Myrtò Papatanasiu in the role of Donna Anna, the lovely voice of Julie Boulianne as Donna Elvira and the elegant timbre of Julien Behr as Don Ottavio, not forgetting the magnificent Commendatore of Steven Humes and the lively Zerlina and Masetto of Anna Grevelius and Marc Scoffoni.

After a first recital album devoted to Rachmaninoff, Shostakovich and Denisov in the company of the pianist Jonas Vitaud, Victor Julien-Laferrière now presents two cello concertos by Antonín Dvorák (op.104) and Bohuslav Martinu (no.1, H196), accompanied by the Liège Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Gergely Madaras.

Published in Amsterdam in the mid-seventeenth century, Der Fluyten Lust-Hof (The Garden of Flute Delights) is a collection of variations for solo flute on the ‘hits’ of European music of the time, borrowed from such composers as Caccini, Dowland, Bull and Moulinié. Its Dutch compiler, Jacob van Eyck, was born blind. As carillonist of Utrecht Cathedral, subsequently in charge of all the city’s chimes of bells, he made fundamental advances in acoustics and bell tuning. Despite this busy activity, he also found time to play the recorder as a virtuoso, especially ‘to entertain strollers in the garden of St John’s Church in the evening with the sound of his little flute’. It was probably the repertory built up in this context that he published under the title Der Fluyten Lust-Hof. For this recording, François Lazarevitch uses instruments characteristic of Van Eyck’s time: not only the recorder, but also and above all cylindrical transverse flutes, as well as a seventeenth-century musette.

Although Giuseppe Tartini was taught the first rudiments of music at the College of the Padri dell Scuole Pie in Capodistria, and may have received lessons in counterpoint from the Franciscan Bohuslav Cernohorsky in Assisi, many elements give the impression that the boy had an education that was anything but ‘academic,’ and that the future ‘maestro delle nazioni’ largely taught himself. However, there does exist a declared model for the music of Tartini, at least for a certain period: that of Corelli. His output seems dominated initially by the influence of his great predecessor in terms of both language and structure. The reference to folk music in his music is also obvious. Another interesting element in the sonatas presented on this release is the presence of mottoes of varying length placed next to the incipits of certain movements, and often written in a ciphered cuneiform alphabet invented by the composer. These are poetic quotations, mostly drawn from the works of Metastasio, although not all of them have been identified. At the end of this recording is one of Tartini’s very rare vocal pieces, the last composition copied into MS 1888/1. The poem Solitario bosco ombroso, based on a clearly Petrarchan model and on the classical antecedents of Tibullus and Propertius, was published for the first time by the poet Paolo Rolli in London in 1727, in a musical setting by Rolli himself.