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POKORN´y Concerto in D for Horn, Timpani, and Strings. ROSETTI Horn Concertos: in E?; in d. PUNTO Horn Concerto No. 5 in F • Radek Baborák (hn); Prague CO • SUPRAPHON 4017 (72:51)


František Xaver Jan Pokorný (1729–94) served Count Philipp Karl of Öettingen-Wallerstein as court violinist from 1750 to 1754, whereupon he was sent to further his studies at Mannehim with Johann Stamitz, Richter, and Holzbauer. Upon returning to his court position, Pokorný was promised the position of choral director, but the Count reneged on his pledge. Patiently biding his time, Pokorný waited until 1766 when the Count finally obliged him by dying. It was then that Pokorný petitioned Prince Alexander Ferdinand Thurn-Taxis in Regensburg for a position at the Prince’s royal chapel. Admittance was granted, and there he remained for the rest of his life.


Some 100 symphonies have been attributed to Pokorný, but more than half of them cannot be authoritatively verified, as autographed scores in the Thurn-Taxis archive support his authorship in only about three dozen of them. Though Pokorný was not a horn player himself, his daughter, Beata, was. She became an acclaimed virtuoso on the instrument, and it’s a certainty that Pokorný wrote the concerto heard on this disc for her.


Antonio Rosetti (c. 1750–92) has fared somewhat better in the recognized name department. He was born Anton Rösler in what is believed to have been the Bohemian town of Litom?e?ice, though details of his exact date of birth and birthplace are not known for sure. What is known is that he returned from a trip to Italy sometime around 1773 no longer Rösler but Rosetti, and under his new Italianized name, he published a great deal of music, including numerous symphonies, concertos, and vocal works. Though Rosetti’s instrument was the double bass, not the horn, he is perhaps best known today for his several horn concertos, which, according to H. C. Robbins Landon, may have been the model for Mozart’s horn concertos.


Giovanni Punto (1746–1803) is another composer who underwent a name change. He was born Jan Václav Stich in Žehušice, Bohemia. Of the three composers on this CD, Punto is the only one who actually played the horn and who distinguished himself as one of its leading lights of the day. At a young age, he was sent by Count Johann Joseph Thun to study the instrument under Joseph Matiegka in Prague, then with Jan Schindelarz in Munich, and finally with A. J. Hampel in Dresden. The last named had long-ranging significance, as Hampel taught the precocious Punto—still Stich at the time—the new hand-stopping technique, which he would later improve upon.


The story might have ended badly for Stich, but Fate intervened on his behalf. After returning to the service of the Count, who had now invested a royal’s ransom in his young horn player’s education, the 20-year-old ingrate ran away with friends. As Shakespeare wrote, “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child!” The infuriated Count, in a fit of cut-off-your-own-nose-to-spite-your-face pique and Biblically inspired retribution, sent his soldiers to apprehend Stich and knock out his teeth to prevent him from ever playing the horn again. But Stich escaped into Italy and became Giovanni Punto. After a brief stint in a couple of court orchestras, he began to freelance, finding himself much in demand in Paris, where he played nearly 50 concerts between 1776 and 1788 and met the Mozarts, père and fils.


Punto wrote a great deal of music, mostly for horn, mainly to display his own technical prowess on the instrument. Among his works are some 16 horn concertos, 47 horn trios, and 21 horn quartets. Few are performed or recorded, but Punto’s name remains a highlighted footnote to history, immortalized by Beethoven who composed his F-Major Horn Sonata, op. 17, for the brilliant player in 1800. The sonata was also published in a version for cello, but only rarely is it included in recordings of Beethoven’s complete works for cello and piano.


Only those who might have preferred a recording of these works on period instruments will be disappointed; all others rejoice. Nothing more really need be said about Radek Baborák beyond noting that since 2003 he has played principal horn in the Berlin Philharmonic. With that prestigious post on his résumé he can lay claim to one of the loftiest perches in horndom. But should you wish to know more about his illustrious career, check it out at his Web site: baborak.com.


From an artist of this caliber one expects nothing less than perfection and that’s what one gets on this recording. A tone of burnished gold issues forth from an instrument under absolute command. Pitch and breath control are perfect, and register shifts are so smooth and seamless that one is not even aware of them. This is truly some of the most awesome horn playing I think I’ve ever heard. The Prague Chamber Orchestra is conductorless; the ensemble, which has been around since 1951, plays with unanimity and precision, and sounds like it’s thoroughly into the high spirits of this music.


And as an afterword on the music, let me just say that I would give all of Mozart’s horn concertos, and Haydn’s too, for any one of the concertos on this disc. These are gloriously beautiful works that deserve far more exposure than they’ve had. I have a now 30-year-old recording of the Punto concerto with Barry Tuckwell, Neville Marriner, and the ASMF on EMI, and a 22-year-old recording of the Pokorný with Hermann Baumann, Iona Brown, and the ASMF on Philips. Neither touches this new one with Baborák, and both are showing their age.


This is definitely a disc for the horn lover. It’s also a disc for all those interested in lesser luminaries from the time of Haydn and Mozart who in their own day shone more brightly than they do now. Thumbs way up on this one.


FANFARE: Jerry Dubins

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In the wake of the highly acclaimed recording of Janácek’s symphonic works (Sinfonietta, Taras Bulba, etc., SU 4131; Orchestral Choice, Gramophone, August 2013), Tomáš Netopil and the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra have focused on the composer’s vocal- instrumental pieces. The Glagolitic Mass is a generally known work, yet not in the composer’s original “September 1927” version, as it was performed at the premiere in Brno, which has been recorded for the very first time for this CD. It is fascinating to observe how many distinct traits of Janácek’s expressive musical language have vanished from the work as a result of its later modifications. The Eternal Gospel, on the other hand, is a piece virtually unknown worldwide (the only previous Supraphon recording was made almost fifty years ago).

Janácek was inspired by, and created the libretto on the basis of, Jaroslav Vrchlický’s poem about the medieval monk Joachim de Fiore, to whom an angel appeared, bringing tidings of the arrival of a realm of love. Janácek worked on the piece concurrently with the opera The Excursion of Mr. Broucek to the Moon and completed it in the spring of 1914, a few months prior to the outbreak of World War I. Netopil’s new recording may facilitate bringing the remarkable work back to concert stages.

BRASS 5

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V 5: CANTATAS (BWV 14,16,17,18

Florian Glemser demonstrates a particular and profound understanding of the Schumann works performed on this album. The exhilaration, the depression, the obsession, the madness, the tenderness, the belligerence, the resignation, but above all the love and the beauty are all there, delicately and thoughtfully interwoven into the fabric of the performance. This is a powerful interpretation full of color and hidden depths which carries the lsitener on a journey of fascinating exploration into the psyche of the tortured composer. This is a recording of rare insight.

Krzysztof Meyer’s Trio for Clarinet, Cello and Piano was composed as commission for the Sommerliche Musiktage festival in Hitzacker and was premiered on July 31, 1999. The trio can be easily associated with Brahms’ music. Meyer believes that musical narration makes sense and his music always strives for something or generates an expectation.

After great popularity in Italy, the mandolin came into favor in the Paris salons c. 1760, when the ‘galant’ style was at its height and the virtuoso qualities of the Neapolitan mandolin players were greatly appreciated by the members of high society who frequented the salons. Christian Schneider teaches at the Schola Cantorum in Paris and works at the Opéra, with the Ensemble Intercontemporain and for Radio France, as well as appearing with many international orchestras. Sylvie Pécot-Douatte has aimed to revive and focus attention on French keyboard music of the late 18th c.

It was Leticia Gomez-Tagle's dream to record two major works of the piano repertoire which she has performed in concert for many years: Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition" and Ravel's "Gaspard de la nuit". In order to balance the two dramatic works, two transcriptions of Schubert songs by Franz Liszt were inserted between them.

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Exhibitions and symposia on the work of the painter Peter Paul Rubens, which took place in Belgium from 1998 to 2014, were the main reason that led to this recording. The ensemble La Fenice was on a mission to help rediscovering the unjustly forgotten composers, all of them contemporaries of this universal genius, and their works. The relationship between music and painting soon becomes clear.

Supraphon’s survey of music in 18th-century Prague includes two sonatas by Frantisek Benda, one by Carl Heinrich Graun that used to pass as a work by Benda, a sonata by Josef Antonín Gurecký, and two by Frantisek Jiránek. Of these musical figures, Benda may be the best known; Dr. Charles Burney met him and considered him original in his time (although, like Giuseppe Tartini, Benda placed primary importance on the singing quality of his compositions for violin).


The program, played at a pitch approaching A=415, opens with Benda’s Sonata in Bb Major. In the opening Largo, violinist Lenka Torgersen demonstrates, with sonorous support from cellist Libor Masek, with what vocal purity Benda’s lines can flow; but she brings a lively playfulness to the ensuing Allegro , and to the following rapid movement. The first of Jiránek’s two sonatas, in F Major, shares in its opening Adagio the singing quality of Benda’s works, but Torgersen encrusts the Allegro that follows with spunky ornamentation and gives the final Tempo di Menuet an ingratiatingly zesty performance. The third sonata on the program, again by Benda, brings another engaging dialogue in the graceful opening Siciliano between the solo violin and the continuo group. The Allegro that follows contains some brief passages on the G-string; and, digging into them, Torgersen reveals the strength in this register of the 1760 violin by Sebastian Klotz upon which she plays, a register earlier composers generally avoided because of the massiveness and therefore the balkiness of the lowest string. She also spits defiantly in the movement’s across-the-string staccatos. These staccatos reappear in modified form during the thematically similar finale.


The sonata formerly attributed to Benda (and bearing catalog numbers for both composers) demands from the performers a similar lyrical affinity, especially, perhaps, in its Andante . Gurecký’s four-movement work (the others on the program all fall into three movements) includes in its second movement passages novel in harmony and some attempts to extend the violin part’s ambit upward; but its overall style fits into that prevalent in the rest of the program. The recital closes with a Sonata in C Major by Jiránek, at more than 12 minutes the longest of the program’s works. Its Adagio gives Torgersen an opportunity to indulge in pregnant rhetorical pauses, and Luks offsets its singing lyricism with flashing runs. The ensemble makes an especially strong case for the gavotte and variations that constitute the finale.


Leila Schayegh, Václav Luks, and Felix Knecht made a selection of Benda’s sonatas on Glossa 922507, Fanfare 35:6, as did Hans-Joachim Berg and Naoko Akutagawa on Naxos 8.572307, Fanfare 35:4. Berg produces a tone more nasal in quality and occasionally sounds as though he shifts awkwardly between positions, but he has the advantage of playing Benda’s ornamentation. Schayegh, on the other hand, playing some of the sonatas with fortepiano, deploys a tone lighter in weight but flexible and expressive. For those interested only in Benda’s works, it might be a toss-up, but for the entire program, Torgersen’s is hard to beat, with its lyrical and at times jaunty performances, and deserves to be recommended to almost all listeners.

FANFARE: Robert Maxham

JESU MEINE FREUDE

Barbara Thornton and Benjamin Bagby here reaffirm their position as two of the most lucid and imaginative singers of medieval music that we have.

Quite suddenly it seems to be the turn of the Notre-Dame era to get first-rate, concentrated and intelligent attention from performing groups. Here to join the Gothic Voices record of "Music For The Lion-Hearted King" (Hyperion 0 CDA66336, 10/89) and the Hilliard Ensemble's collection of music by Perotinus (ECM/New Note 0 837 751-2, 2/90), we have a record devoted to the leading poet of the Notre-Dame movement, Philippe the Chancellor.

Nobody's work could be more welcome at the moment. One of the many astonishing and brilliant passages in Craig Wright's magisterial new book on Music and Ceremony at Notre Dame of Paris (Cambridge University Press: 1989) shows almost conclusively that Philippe and Perotinus were extremely close colleagues; they probably sat in opposite seats in the church daily for some 20 years before Philippe's death in 1236; they were joint signatories of several documents; and not only did Perotinus demonstrably set at least one text by Philippe but Philippe wrote several poems to existing music by Perotinus.

Further to that, the extremely informative note that Peter Dronke contributes to this new record mentions his own new (apparently still unpublished) reconsideration of Philippe's work, bringing its total to almost 90 songs. How much of this music for them is by Philippe himself, it is too soon to say; but he must in any case now take his place as one of the most important figures in thirteenth-century music. And a signal benefit of this record is not only that the texts are newly reedited and translated by Dronke but that they are given the literary explanation that seems indispensable for music of this kind.

In comparison with the two discs already mentioned, the ensemble singing of Sequentia may occasionally seem a little rough in intonation, blend and balance; but it is nevertheless very fine, distinguished by a forthright declamatory manner that is well suited to the mood of these heavily political and polemical poems. There might also be some room for suggesting that the emphasis on very slow declamation in the solo songs rather fights against the inbuilt momentum and mordant wit of the poems; Si vis vera takes 13 minutes when about three should have been plenty; though in the same breath one must add that Barbara Thornton and Benjamin Bagby here reaffirm their position as two of the most lucid and imaginative singers of medieval music that we have. Whatever my slight reservations in the light of other recent records, then, this is an important and highly impressive record.

-- Gramophone [11/1990]

• Hungarian violinist of Orsolya Korcsolán presents three “Gold” composers, a project she's always desired to see come to fruition. • The Rubin Goldmark work, “Plaintive Air”, is a world premier recording. • Audiences around the world have been captivated since her debut in New York's Paul Hall by her technical command, warm sound combine and elegant stage presence. In addition to performing and presenting lectures, Ms. Korcsolán's also completing her PhD at the Budapest University of Jewish Studies.

Baroque Music - Cabezon, A. / Padilla, J.G. De / Clemens Non

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