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    Bach's Roots - Early Influences on the Young Master
    Arcana

    Bach's Roots - Early Influences on the Young Master

    CD · 1 disc

    $20.99
    Composer
    Various
    Artist
    Voces Suaves, Akademie fur Alte Musik Berlin
    Released
    Sep 06, 2024
    This first joint project by the Akademie fur Alte Musik Berlin and the Basel-based vocal ensemble Voces Suaves is dedicated to the musical milieu into which Johann Sebastian Bach was born, and especially to those composers who had a demonstrable influence on the work of the man who would later become Thomaskantor in Leipzig. In addition to pieces from the Altbachisches Archiv (Archive of the Older Bachs), the album features sacred concertos and early cantatas by Bach's predecessors and superiors from Arnstadt, Muhlhausen, Weimar and Leipzig, and with them impressive proof of how highly developed the musical tradition of Central Germany then was. Although many of the composers are completely unknown to us today, their works, some of which are recorded here for the first time, provide a fascinating insight into the musical language of late seventeenth-century Germany with it's inspiring wealth of colours and forms.
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  • Bach's Roots - Early Influences on the Young Master

    Bach's Roots - Early Influences on the Young Master

    Arcana Sep 2024
    1 disc
    CD
    $20.99
    1. Das Partiturbuch / Zincke, Ensemble Echo Du Danube
    2. Das Partiturbuch / Zincke, Ensemble Echo Du Danube
    Naxos

    Das Partiturbuch / Zincke, Ensemble Echo Du Danube

    CD · 1 disc

    $13.99 $19.99 Save 30%
    Composer
    VARIOUS
    Artist
    Zincke
    Released
    May 16, 2006
    The Partiturbuch Ludwig takes its name from its compiler, Jacob Ludwig, a court musician active in Gotha in the mid-years of the seventeenth century. In 1662 he presented his folio of contemporary instrumental compositions to Duke August, a former employer of his from Ludwig’s time in Wolfenbüttel. There are about one hundred works, mainly though not exclusively cast in sonata form, and all written in Germany though not necessarily by Germans. This disc casts a shrewd eye over the whole corpus of this folio and has selected a representative and really rather impressive selection to reflect its breadth and range.

    One of the most obvious highlights is the work of Antonio Bertali, who contributed the most music (eighteen pieces) to the folio. He was the Kapellmeister in Vienna and was a significant figure, composing music for successive Emperors and achieving a position of pan-European eminence. Born in Verona he was originally a violinist and this accounts for his mastery of composition for the instrument. The Ciaconna in C major is a ceaselessly imaginative work, full of probing musicianship and dextrously laid out. The Sonata a 3 taps into the nobility of utterance of which he was so adroit an exponent – though it also shows another side to him, with the perky bassoon line adding spice and wit, and the mobility of the writing adding colour and dynamic contrast.

    Schmelzer’s Sonata variata is lyrical, elegant and is warmly played here, with charming dynamism of expression and very touching diminuendi. Capricornus directed church music in Pressburg (now Bratislava) but his gifts were by no means confined to the vocal. He writes a Ciaconna of considerable standing and the performers here do well to explore his supportive theorbo and harpsichord writing - it’s very rewarding. We finish with yet another Ciaconna, a form at which these Italian and German composers excelled, and that’s the one by Nathanael Schnittelbach. Resident in the Hanseatic city of Lübeck, Schnittelbach arrived via Gdansk in 1655 and carved out a successful career in his newly adopted city. It’s all the more disappointing then to find that this is his only surviving solo violin work especially as it’s so assured and impressive a piece. One has to remember that these composers were writing many years before the Italian virtuoso school took hold; if one thinks of Tartini here or Sammartini one is very much a-historical, though the powerful rhetoric that such as Schnittelbach evokes is certainly a strong indicator of native German solo violin strength in the two generations before the birth of J.S. Bach.

    A number of new Naxos discs seem to be derived from German radio studios of late. This one was recorded – for broadcast? – in 2002. It’s excellently engineered and played, as I’ve suggested, with flair, imagination and no little virtuosity by the Ensemble Echo du Danube.

    -- Jonathan Woolf, MusicWeb International
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  • Das Partiturbuch / Zincke, Ensemble Echo Du Danube
    Sale

    Das Partiturbuch / Zincke, Ensemble Echo Du Danube

    Naxos May 2006
    1 disc
    CD
    $19.99 $13.99Save 30%