The album provides a unique opportunity to get to know the oeuvre of forgotten masters of the mature Baroque era and to admire their talent and compositional craftsmanship. Thanks to it's exuberant production, the Altberg Ensemble, specializing in historically informed performance on period instruments, transfers listeners to the world of emotions, intrigue and entertainment of sixteenth-century European courts.

Includes work(s) by Philipp H. Erlebach. Ensemble: Les Amis de Philippe. Conductor: Ludger Rémy.

Classical Music

The Sächsisches Vocalensemble under Matthias Jung has now recorded its second selection of Christmas gems for cpo from one of the most important collections of Lutheran church music, the St. Augustin School in Grimma, Saxony. The focus: festive, magnificent church cantatas (most of them including Christmas trumpet splendor) by composers from Central Germany who were famous musicians and held prominent posts during the years before and after 1700. To name only a few: Johann Schelle, Philipp Heinrich Erlebach, and Johann Rosenmüller, as well as composers such as Christian Liebe or Gottfried Vogel who are no longer remembered today but whose music brings wonder to modern listeners.

In 1694 Philipp Heinrich Erlebach, kapellmeister at the court of Count Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, published a collection of trio sonatas for a typical German ensemble of the period: violin, viola da gamba, and bass continuo. Pairing the violin with the viola da gamba seems to exemplify the fusion of Italian and French musical traditions, and this same fusion is found in the forms of these compositions, with an Italianate sonata followed by a suite of French dances – a model that Johann Sebastian Bach would later recall. These sonata-suites are endowed with undeniable charm and an infectious liveliness, and François Joubert-Caillet, with his ensemble L’Achéron, give us a particularly seductive interpretation of them.

Accompanied by his ensemble Le Banquet Céleste, the countertenor Damien Guillon places his voice at the service of a programme of vocal pieces by the German Baroque composer Philipp Heinrich Erlebach, a large part of whose output was destroyed in a fire at Rudolstadt Castle in 1735. Among the works that have come down to us are the two collections Harmonische Freude musikalischer Freunde, containing respectively fifty and twenty-five arias for one to four solo voices, instrumental ensemble and basso continuo. Most of the German texts of these pieces depict humankind at the mercy of an unpredictable and volatile destiny. Alongside natural phenomena such as storms, dark clouds and withered leaves, the poet also chooses the expression ‘bloody comets’ as a metaphor for torment and ‘the distress of the heart’. In fact, the biggest comet of the seventeenth century appeared in Europe in 1680: contemporaries feared these celestial bodies, seeing them as bad omens.

Printed in Nuremberg in 1694, Erlebach’s Six Sonatas for violin, viola da gamba and basso continuo, marked by both French and Italian influences, are among his few instrumental pieces to have survived. They are performed here by the Stylus Phantasticus ensemble, joined by the baritone Victor Torres for several expressive arias focusing on the theme of the ‘volatile destiny of the human being’. After the success of the Red, Yellow, Blue, Pink and White collections (a total of sixty reissues) which gave a new lease of life to the pearls of the Baroque catalogues from our house labels, here are fourteen new titles which offer a chance to discover other treasures, whether Baroque or dating from an earlier or later era. Like the most recent series, this sixth instalment opens out onto the Classical repertory (Mozart by Ensemble 415 and Chiara Banchini) and the Renaissance (Févin by Doulce Mémoire and Denis Raisin Dadre); recordings that are an integral part of Alpha’s identity and history. Fourteen reissues performed by the leading musicians in the field, most of which received one or more awards on their original release. Proper booklets accompany the discs, with notes in three languages (French, English, German). Photographers from all over the world have been selected to illustrate the covers, this time with the guiding thread of the color green, a symbol of nature, fertility . . . and hope!